Cocaine abuse had looked like becoming a problem during the first World War and the early 1920s but never really took hold. It was expensive, had a reputation as a ‘champagne drug’ and was far more strongly associated with American culture. Back then if the British wanted to snort something that would keep them up all night, they generally preferred amphetamine.
Heroin, on the other hand, was widely seen as the scourge of society: in 1984 a massive 312 kilos had been seized. Government statistics estimated that there were more than fifty thousand addicts in the country, a figure that was rising fast, and newspapers and magazines were filled with stories about the developing ‘heroin crisis’.
But as 1985 drew to a close the picture slowly changed. Cocaine seizures suddenly doubled and Interpol agents described the British market as ‘an unpicked plum’, warning that the detailed profiles used to spot potential cannabis and heroin smugglers were failing to catch those bringing in the white stuff. That same year, soon after Scotland Yard’s Drugs Squad made their biggest ever single seizure – a whole six kilos – the
Sunday Times
dubbed cocaine ‘the new threat’ and detailed how the saturation of the American market was set to lead to a huge surge in European seizures. A few days later the
Financial Times
noted nervously that the wealth and power of the world’s cocaine barons was becoming ‘unassailable’.
Within months David Mellor, then Home Office minister, toured Bolivia and Peru to distribute cocaine-fighting aid aimed at helping to prevent the drugs reaching the UK. It was too little, far too late. Shortly after Mellor’s return, Assistant Commissioner John Dellow of the Metropolitan Police warned that there was growing evidence to suggest that ‘violent and evil’ criminals from South America were hard at work trying to set up a drug-distribution centre in Britain.
Soon afterwards Richard Lawrence, then chief investigation officer of HM Customs and Excise, was describing cocaine as ‘the greatest concern for the future’ because of signs that the South American organisations were trying to create an infrastructure in the UK to sell and market their product.
In fact, that infrastructure had existed for some time. With its common language and large Colombian population, Spain was the natural port of entry for Colombian cocaine. The traffickers received a boost when changes to Spanish law decriminalised the possession of cocaine unless the amount involved greatly exceeded an individual’s personal needs. Though not changing the legal status of large-scale smuggling, the new liberal attitude meant the local police were often diverted to other duties, giving the drugs barons virtual free rein.
The cartel operatives arrived in Spain to find hundreds of leading British gangsters
in situ
: following the collapse of the extradition treaty, they had set up home on the now infamous Costa del Crime to settle back and enjoy a hassle-free life. But few of them had retired completely. After some initial reluctance to get involved in drug-trafficking, a few of these old-timers began to dabble in the cannabis trade, facilitating the movement of tonnes of resin from Morocco to the UK. The vast profits and relatively low risks (especially compared to armed robbery) soon attracted interest, and by the time the South American cartels arrived, the British were well placed to assist them. By the end of the decade high-profile seizures of multi-kilo loads were becoming a regular occurrence, yet masses of cocaine was still getting through, the price was falling and demand was growing fast.
But cocaine would never have taken off in the UK unless it had been carefully marketed to create a growing demand. Not only had that already been done, but it had virtually all been the work of one man.
Eugene Carter got his first introduction to the criminal life courtesy of his uncle. Johnny Carter was a legendary face who, during the 1950s, had run racetrack gangs for the likes of Jack Spot and later hit the headlines after a dramatic knife fight with none other than Mad Frankie Fräser. Growing up on the fringes of the underworld, Eugene first made his living from his family business – scrap metal. A traditional rag-and-bone man, he rode up and down the streets of south London in a horse-drawn cart collecting rubbish.
He spent a lot of time with his cousins, the Walker brothers, who in the early 1980s were ranked alongside the top armed robbers in the capital, and would while away hours drinking at Charlie’s wine bar in Lewisham, a popular haunt for many south London faces. It was there that Carter became friendly with the likes of Jimmy Tippett Jnr and Brian Reader, later convicted of handling gold from the Brinks Mat robbery.
Although he never became an armed robber himself – friends say he lacked the courage – it was the aftermath of the Brinks Mat job that first set Carter on the path that would ultimately lead to his untimely death.
With most of those responsible for stealing or handling the gold bullion behind bars within a year, south London was suddenly awash with friends and relations of the gang who found themselves looking after vast sums of money. Some simply buried the cash, others invested in property. Carter was the first to see the potential of the fast-growing cocaine market and invested in that instead.
His system was so simple and so foolproof that not one shipment was ever intercepted. Carter had become friendly with some of the staff in the Colombian embassy and, using their diplomatic privileges, they brought in hundreds of kilos of super high-quality cocaine with them on every trip. (This method of smuggling is still widely used, though rarely uncovered. In October 2003 a diplomatic bag containing £1 million worth of cocaine was intercepted on its way to the Sierra Leone high commission in London. The drugs were found by United Nations officers – acting on a tip-off – who gained special permission directly from Sierra Leone’s president to open the bags before they left Africa
en route
for Gatwick.)
‘Carter always had money,’ says Jimmy Tippett, ‘but within the space of a few months he went from having a bit of money to having absolutely fucking millions. I was just a kid but I’ll never forget some of what I saw during those days. I was doing little favours for him, driving his car and delivering bits and pieces. I remember one time he was at the races and he took two hundred grand with him and blew every single penny. Not only that but by the time he left he owed the bookmakers an extra sixty thousand that he’d got on credit. The man had millions and millions and he didn’t give a fuck. I’d never seen people do that sort of money, not ever and not since.
‘Eugene wasn’t the only one who got rich. The Brinks Mat robbery turned all of south London around. It saw a lot of people moving out of their council houses into big eight- or nine-bedroom mansions in Kent or Essex. And it saw a lot of people moving into coke as well. In those days the only people the Colombians would deal with were the old faces – that’s why you had people like Eddie Richardson and some of the Great Train Robbers like Jimmy Hussey and Tommy Wisbey getting done for drugs in the early nineties. Nowadays that’s all changed and they’ll deal with anyone. But back then they were only really dealing with Eugene and he was cleaning up.
‘Nowadays no one could afford to be that flash – the police would be on them like a shot, and now with all this asset-recovery stuff, you’d never get away with it. Back then it was different. The police might have had an idea that he was up to something but his system was so tight and he kept himself so far removed from the actual street sales, he was virtually untouchable.’
Carter’s excessive lifestyle soon earned him a nickname – Eugene Cartier. His party trick was to take off his Cartier watch and smash it on the floor in the middle of a nightclub to the astonishment of those around him. His favourite piece was a diamond-studded square Rolex that had cost him £170,000 and had originally been commissioned for the Sultan of Brunei. He also regularly wore a baguette diamond ring worth £250,000. These and a few other bits and pieces meant Carter could boast that he never left the house with less than half a million pounds’ worth of jewellery on him.
‘He drove around in a Rolls-Royce Corniche convertible, which he’d bought brand new, paying ninety grand in cash for it,’ says Tippett. ‘I drove it once – he was at the races and wanted some extra money to put down some bets so he gave me the keys and asked me to go and fetch him thirty grand. When I got back he put the lot on one horse. It came in fifth or something but he didn’t bat an eyelid, he just laughed.
‘Eugene had so much money that he just didn’t know what to do with it all. He’d go out clubbing for the night and think nothing of spending ten thousand on bottles of Cristal champagne.
‘He was rich and surrounded himself with people who were willing to do anything for him, but the truth is that nobody liked him. The reason is that he was a horrible, horrible cunt. He was the sort of person who would open up a gram of charlie in the VIP section of our favourite club and wait until a little crowd gathered around him. He would have a snort, give maybe one other person a snort and look up at all the people waiting for their turn. Then he would pretend to sneeze, blow the whole lot over the floor and say, “Whoops, sorry.”
‘Then he’d pull out another gram and do exactly the same thing again. He used to do stuff on purpose, always psychological, playing with people’s minds. I once saw him throw three grand on the floor of a club, then sit back and watch people fighting to get the money. He had a real inferiority complex because he was a real ugly bastard, all cropped ginger hair and a big nose. He used to set fire to fifty-pound notes in front of birds to try and impress them. The only way he ever got laid was through the money and being flash so that’s the way he behaved.
‘The police soon got wind of what he was up to and spent a couple of years keeping him under non-stop surveillance but it was a waste of time. They saw him have a few meetings and even hand over the odd bit of cash here and there but there was nothing to link him to drugs at all. Rather than swoop and get him for something small, they wanted to wait and take him for something that would put him away for a long, long time, but that just wasn’t going to happen. He was too careful for that. Or, at least, he was at the start.
‘Doing coke was a very different experience back then. For one thing the quality was excellent. You would have a little toot and you would know all about it. I guess the Colombians wanted people to get a taste for it to help develop the market so the stuff coming over was virtually pure. Nowadays even before it gets here it has been cut to shit. The Colombians got to the point where they started thinking, Why bother getting money for just one kilo when we can cut it two or three times and still make loads of money? Plenty of people out there are having a good time and they’re more than happy with the money they’re paying, but they don’t know what they’re missing.
‘Because it was so good, people couldn’t get enough of it and they were always coming back for more. That meant the money just kept rolling in, much faster than Eugene could ever spend it. No matter what he did, there was always more just around the corner.
‘He bought this massive house in Chislehurst, paid a million pounds for it, and would have wild parties there with loads of champagne and coke and caviar almost every weekend.
‘But Eugene was using more coke than anyone. But for the fact that he wasn’t paying for it, he would have been his own best customer. After a few years the pressure really started to get to him. He was getting more and more paranoid and more and more out of control. Coke’s the last thing in the world you need if you’re feeling like that, but Eugene just couldn’t leave it alone. He’d give up for a week or so and try to sort himself out, but then he’d be right back on it, worse than before.
‘Anyone else would have had to stop: they would have run out of money or be so busy stealing and selling their body that they wouldn’t have time to do any drugs. But Eugene was so rich there were no limits to what he could do. Before long he was spending six or seven grand a night on coke. It was incredible.
‘The parties continued but Eugene wasn’t enjoying any of it any more. He’d lock himself in his room for six or seven hours at a time and talk about the fact that people were after him. A few times I saw him on a really bad day and it was sad to see him like that.
‘Around that time he started paying money to hitmen to go and shoot people. He was convinced someone was trying to take his monopoly away from him. He just couldn’t see that the thing with the embassy was so sweet that there was no way anyone could challenge him.
‘The paranoia took over and he got into a big beef with a rival gang who were controlling the coke trade in north London. Eugene was in charge south of the river but convinced himself that the other gang wanted it all to themselves. Then that thing with the cyclist happened and the stress was just too much.
‘There was a theory that the rival gang had been responsible, that they’d gone to his house with guns and made him hang himself. Whichever way it was, his death was the end of an era and those that had become rich as part of his drugs empire soon found themselves in need of another supplier. But not everyone minded when Eugene died. A lot of people owed him a lot of money for coke so they ended up having a right touch. One geezer I know owed him for thirty kilos so he couldn’t have been happier.’
For the first five years of its life, cocaine wasn’t cocaine at all. The active ingredient of the humble coca leaf was first identified in Germany in 1855 by chemist Friedrich Gaedecke who named it erythroxyline. Four years later a second chemist, Albert Niemann, managed to isolate the product and renamed it cocaine.
Hailed as a wonder drug and fabulous health tonic, cocaine was sold openly over the counter, even in Harrods, and became a popular ingredient in many wines and medicines. There were toothache cures, coca cigarettes that were guaranteed to lift depression, chocolate cocaine tablets that mixed the best of both worlds.