Hash (18 page)

Three or four minutes later, Len reappears with a broad grin on his face. ‘Blimey. You’ll wish you’d put a tape recorder in my pocket when you hear this, mate.’

I nod to encourage him to proceed.

‘That kid was working as a “rep” for a copper, who wanted four twenty-quid bags. What a result!’

‘What’s a “rep”?’ I ask, almost innocently.

‘That’s a middle man. He was coming in on behalf of the copper.’

‘But how did he find you?’

‘I’m known in these parts.’

But, I wanted to know, why didn’t the policeman deal direct with Len?

‘Oh, I get this sort of stuff all the time. Coppers don’t want to be spotted talking to anyone like me so they use other people to do their dirty work for them. Typical slippery bastards, eh?’

‘But how d’you know he was working for a policeman then?’

‘Oh I know ’cos I asked him. I never flog stuff to people without knowing exactly who I am speaking to. It’s one of my golden rules.’

‘Yeah,’ I point out. ‘But what’s the point in that cop using that young guy if you now know who he is?’

‘That’s their problem, ain’t it?’

Our conversation was interrupted by a text coming through on Len’s smart phone. He stopped to read it.

‘Right. We’re on our way. One of my special customers wants a drop-off,’ said Len, laughing mainly to himself. He did a lot of that.

Fifteen minutes later, I’m sitting in Len’s rundown Vauxhall estate car as he knocks on the door of a third-floor council flat on one of the biggest estates in west London. It’s an area fraught with deprivation; gangs of feral kids out on the narrow walkways that divide half a dozen tower blocks. Older youths congregating on street corners.

I glance up at the doorway that Len has just entered and wonder what he’s doing there. It’s another twenty minutes until he emerges, by which time a pack of local youths have
started circling Len’s vehicle as if I am an undercover police officer.

It’s only when they see Len’s obese figure waddling towards them that they pull back. He gives them a cold, hard stare.

Back inside the car, Len lets out a long, irritable breath. ‘What a fuckin’ shit-hole. You’re lucky I didn’t take you in there, mate.’

Len continued without bothering to let me respond: ‘That is what you call a drug den. It’s horrible and smelly and he’s got a family of Rottweilers who bare their teeth and then try to stick their noses up yer arse. I told him it puts the punters off but he doesn’t seem to give a fuck. Silly old bastard.’

It then transpires that the ‘silly old bastard’ is a sixty-seven-year-old coke dealer called Stevie, who buys all his hash from Len. ‘He says he hates coke so he needs the hash to stay nice and calm for his customers,’ explains Len.

Stevie runs his stinking drugs den out of an empty council flat which, according to Len, is often the way with coke and crack dealers. ‘That stuff’s all about the quick hits and dealers move into an empty place for a couple of months and then move on to a new den. The key for them is to hit everyone within close range. I’ve seen queues of more than a dozen desperate crackheads waiting to get into his den.’

Len says he turned his back on Class A drug dealing long ago. ‘I stick to hash because it’s nice and solid work if you can get it. Just sitting in Stevie’s drug den is enough to put you off crack and coke for life. It’s a complete shit-hole and
there’s also the risk that some bastard will try and muscle you out of the way eventually.’

Len says that Stevie is ‘shot to shit’ and barely able to thread a sentence together ‘until he has a toke’. He explains: ‘Poor bastard has snorted so much shit over the years that he’s only just capable of running that den. I’m sure someone younger and more trigger happy will pay him a visit sooner rather than later.’

Back in Len’s car, we don’t have to travel far from the estate to find ourselves in the middle of one of London’s richest property areas. Len’s mood lifts almost immediately. ‘This is where I wish all my customers came from. You don’t get any trouble from the middle classes but then again they don’t take as many drugs. It’s what I call a bit of a Catch-22, eh?’

Len says he prefers to be ‘on the road’ selling hash rather than dealing out of a specific location ‘because it’s harder for the law to nab me red-handed’.

He went on to explain some of the other golden rules of his business: ‘I don’t keep my stash at home, ever. I take the dog out for a walk and then hide it under a bush or near a tree. It’s always packed airtight so no water can get into it but it’s vital it’s not at home just in case the cozzers come calling.’

Len continued: ‘I’ve been chased down a few times by the law and I always chuck the produce anywhere I know I can come back the next day and recover it. One time I threw it on a roof when the police pulled me as I was walking along
a street. They didn’t have a clue about it and next day I got a ladder and clambered up and got it back. Another time I had to throw my stash in a pond when I spotted a couple of plain-clothes coppers behind me in a park one day. I came back later with a long pole and fished it out.’

Len says he has no qualms about people who smoke too much hash. ‘It’s a free world, ain’t it? If they want to smoke themselves silly then it’s up to them. I don’t judge people like that. I’m not forcing them to smoke the stuff, am I? People need to take responsibility for their own actions. I know hash can fuck people up but the way I look at it is that they were probably fucked up before they even took their first ever puff of a joint.’

Then Len made a surprising confession; he often uses lines of cocaine to ‘keep going’ when out and about delivering hash to his customers. ‘I know it might sound strange to most potheads but coke is great at helping me stay alert during a long day in this game. It’s funny ’cos a lot of people who smoke hash really frown upon coke users. Personally, I don’t see the difference. They’re all drugs that give you a high of some sort. I need cocaine to keep me alert and it really does the trick but isn’t it daft that I can’t admit that to my customers in case it puts them off me?’

Len reckons he makes in the region of £2,000 a week as a street-level hash dealer. But he openly admits he hasn’t put much aside for a rainy day. ‘I’m the idiot who spends all his cash. It’s madness really ’cos one day this whole game will go down the tube for me and then I’ll be like most of my mates
and joining the nation’s unemployed. I keep telling myself I should save some cash but I’ve got another weakness that sucks up much of my hard-earned money – gambling.’

Len confesses that he loses up to £1,500 a week in betting shops, gambling mainly on horses. ‘It’s a bigger weakness than drugs in my book. I wish I could knock it on the head but I enjoy the buzz. But it really is a mug’s game and as long as I am hooked I need to sell hash to survive.’

Len’s favourite customer is Ben, a fifty-two-year-old ex-army officer from Surrey, who was shot and almost killed on duty in a war zone more than twenty years ago. Now he uses hash to help ease the pain of his injuries. Len says Ben knows he’s helping finance criminality but his need for hash is indisputable.

‘The guy is a real gem, an army hero who put his life on the line for the rest of us. This is a funny old game,’ says Len. ‘You get a huge cross-section of customers because hash is probably the most classless drug in the world and long may it be that way.’

Career criminals adore the drugs industry because it’s all about ‘the product’. So says Cyril, probably one of the most unlikely hash barons you’ll ever meet. He lives in a large five-bed detached mansion hidden away down an 800-yard drive in the middle of the Kent countryside. Cyril might come from the East End’s school of hard knocks but he revels in living the life of a country squire.

Cyril is a hash ‘financier’. He never gets his hands dirty by even touching the hash as it journeys through the underworld before ending up being smoked by Britain’s millions of hash users. ‘I hate the fuckin’ stuff,’ says Cyril drily and there is no doubt he is telling the truth. ‘Why the hell would anyone take drugs? It beats me.’

Hash is just a lucrative business commodity to Cyril. He is a grandfather now and pledges that if any of his grandchildren got hooked on the stuff, ‘I’d give ’em a good
clip round the ear.’ Cyril doesn’t really seem to appreciate the irony of that statement.

Everything he does centres around money. ‘If there’s an earner in it for me, I’ll do it,’ he says. Cyril’s been ‘in and out’ of the hash game for more than thirty years. He first got involved in the trade after spending eighteen months in prison for fraud. ‘Prison. That’s where you learn the truth about drugs. I made more connections in the slammer than anywhere else and when I got out I knew hash was the business I was going to concentrate on. It’s such a big earner.’

Cyril has a ‘previous’ history in money laundering and financial fraud but, he says, the beauty of being a drug baron is that he doesn’t even have to ‘touch the fuckin’ stuff’.

He explains: ‘The way I operate, the hash comes in to my boys and then gets pushed straight out again to the next rung on the ladder. Usually, it’s not around for more than a few days in one of my lock-ups. The less time the better because that’s when you’ll get sent down if the Old Bill show up.’

Cyril’s background was originally in watch and diamond dealing before he turned to crime. ‘I had a shop in the City. It was the seventies and business was shit back then. I couldn’t afford to keep it all going because the rent was astronomical. Then I met this bloke who said that I should use my accountant’s qualifications to go into money laundering.’

When that eventually landed him in jail he switched to hash. Today, Cyril reckons hash provides him with ‘about
70 per cent of my total earnings. It’s a solid market. It doesn’t change much but I like that because it means I know precisely what I am going to earn from each shipment.’

Cyril was reluctant to go into details about how the shipments of hash come into his hands because ‘there are some evil bastards out there who’d soon try to take over my operation.’

But he did say: ‘Just ’cos it’s hash doesn’t mean there aren’t some bad villains involved in smuggling the stuff. My role is to cough up £50k on a Monday to pay for it and by Friday get £120k back no questions asked. That’s a sweet deal as far as I am concerned.

‘If I end up having to store it for longer that’s obviously a bit of a pain but I have got a brilliant location to keep it for a few days if need be.’

Cyril then showed his true criminal colours when I ask him about what happens if his shipment ‘goes walkabout’. He explains: ‘That’s happened a couple of times and I’ve had to make sure that those responsible for it have paid me back what was owed on the shipment. I don’t care what their excuse is. They have to take financial responsibility for that shipment. It’s one of the rules of this game. And if anyone fails to pay me back after a shipment is lost or stolen or confiscated by the cozzers then they are in deep shit. That’s the way it goes in this business.’

Hearing Cyril talking about ‘hurting’ other gangsters brings the whole hash game back down to earth. His cold, ruthless attitude reminds me that hash remains just another illegal
drug which gangsters like Cyril are making fortunes out of. As he himself admitted: ‘Just because it’s not Class A it doesn’t mean the stakes aren’t high. This is a criminal enterprise and like all such operations it has to make everyone a lot of money or else it’s not worth doing.’

Cyril invited me to go in his gleaming black Bentley Turbo to a nearby lock-up garage, which he admitted is his ‘centre of operations’. He explains: ‘That’ll sound like a joke when I show you this place but it’s come in very handy down the years, especially when I’ve had a few problems with some villains who tried to double-cross me.’

Cyril opens the lock-up with an electronic remote control and the door slides up slowly to reveal three chairs, a table and a line of tools ranging from hacksaws to hammers hanging on the wall at the end of the garage. ‘Welcome to my office,’ says Cyril, almost proudly. ‘This is where all the important meetings take place.’

Cyril walks over to a cupboard in the corner of the damp lock-up with its bare breeze-block walls and reaches up to get something from above the cupboard. As he turns to show me what is in his hand I see it is a black revolver.

‘Don’t worry. It’s not loaded. I’m just looking after it for a friend.’

Then Cyril placed it carefully back where he got it from and continued his guided tour. ‘See these tools?’ says Cyril. ‘They come in very handy if I think anyone is pulling my leg about something serious like a lost shipment of hash.’

Are you serious? I ask. ‘Yeah. Why not? But I got to admit
when my associates see them hanging there they soon get the message. The last thing I want to resort to is actual violence. Much better to scare them shitless.’

In many ways Cyril is one of the single most dangerous criminals I had come across in my journey through the secret underworld of hash. He was dressed up to look like a perfectly normal middle-class businessman from Kent while in fact he was more capable of having someone killed than anyone else I had encountered.

As if reading my mind, Cyril then chipped in: ‘Violence, or the threat of violence, is part of my business. If the other “team” isn’t shit-scared of me, then I’m going to have a problem on my hands. I call it good PR, that’s Public Relations to you and me. I want those villains out there to know they mustn’t risk crossing me. Then I can be certain that things will go smoothly for every deal.’

Cyril leaned across and pulled a hacksaw off its perch and ran his fingertip slowly down the outside of the blade. ‘See that?’ he says, picking something out from between the tiny metal teeth.

‘That’s blood.’ He laughed. ‘That’s what I always tell them and more often than not they look shit-scared and can’t wait to get out of there in one piece.’

‘Is it really?’ I ask.

‘No comment,’ says Cyril with a hearty laugh.

Then he puts the hacksaw back in its place and picks up a claw hammer. ‘My old London robber mates used to say that whacking a hammer on someone’s fingernails usually
did the trick after a few swings. It’s also hard to prove because of the sort of injury you can inflict.’