Cocaine Confidential (24 page)

But when Pete reported back to the man's wife what he'd seen there was an awkward response. ‘She went all quiet after I sat her down and told her. Instead of bursting into tears she just kept nodding her head slowly and saying, “Right.” I then asked her what she was going to do with the information I'd given her and she snapped back at me that it was “none of my fuckin' business”. I started to get a bit worried then because in my game the last thing you want is an angry wife exposing your identity to a cheating husband, especially when they're both criminals. I tried to explain nicely to her that she could not reveal my identity to anyone, let alone her hubby. But she then coolly turned to me and said, “I'm afraid he already knows all about you.”

‘“What?” I said to her.

‘She replied, “Turns out he was having me watched by one of his mates and they saw us in the car park when I first met you. He thought you and I were having a fling, so I had to come clean and tell him the truth.”'

Pete explained: ‘Well, my heart sank when I heard her. What a disaster. The husband might come after me, especially if he got paranoid that I'd seen any of his criminal activities, which I hadn't. I then asked her if she'd told her hubby precisely what I'd seen him get up to. She ignored the question and only mentioned that he was very angry I'd been spying on him.

‘All she cared about was that he'd promised to drop all the women in the flats and not go to brothels any more.'

Pete went on: ‘I didn't have the heart to tell her that he'd never change his ways because men just don't do that on the whole, especially big-time villains. Now my main priority was to ease out of this job without being physically harmed by this woman's associates or her gangster husband.'

Pete then decided, in his words, ‘to enter the Lion's den'. He continued: ‘I reckoned it was safer to meet this character than try and run away from him. It was a gamble but it had to be done, so I phoned him up. He was outraged at first but once he'd calmed down we arranged to meet in a very public place, so that he couldn't let his heavies loose on me.'

It turned out to be a clever move. ‘He was still very upset and called me a piece of scum, which seemed a bit rich coming from him! But then he grudgingly admitted being impressed I'd had the courage to meet him and we actually got on quite well. He even told me his missus had hired two other private investigators before me, who'd both fleeced her of money and done nothing. He seemed to find that quite funny.

‘I realised that this villain had so many contacts in the cocaine underworld that he could become an invaluable source of more work for me. We've stayed in touch ever since and he's recommended me to a number of his associates.'

On another occasion, Pete was hired by the private secretary of a mega-wealthy prince from a foreign royal family living in Mayfair, who suspected one of his most senior
advisers was dealing massive quantities of cocaine bought from a Russian coke baron based in London. Pete explained: ‘They thought this bloke was dealing drugs big-time and were very worried that if he was arrested by the police it could embarrass the royal family. They wanted me to get the evidence, so they could confront him and then quietly fire him before a scandal erupted.'

Pete spent two months shadowing the prince's adviser mainly around central London. ‘The strange thing was that for the first six weeks he didn't go near anyone who even vaguely looked like a drug supplier, let alone a Russian,' says Pete. ‘I was about to recommend to the client that we end the surveillance operation when I saw my man walk into a bar in south London that was notorious for its criminal clientele. I was standing right by him when he met with a young-looking Russian type of man. He had quite gay mannerisms and I wondered if they were having a sexual relationship, even though the target was married with two children.

‘Then I saw this other man handing my target a sachet of something when they shook hands goodbye. I followed my target outside to where he'd parked his car in a side street. The moment he got in the vehicle, I watched him open up the sachet and take a massive snort of what was obviously cocaine. He did exactly the same thing the following three nights and it became clear that rather than being a drug dealer this man was using cocaine for his own personal consumption. That's a different matter altogether and I told my
client that instead of firing this man they should try and persuade him to get help for his addiction. That guy didn't deserve to lose his job, he just needed to sort out his addiction problems, but I later heard that he got kicked out of his job anyway.'

Pete earns upwards of £100,000 a year working as a private eye and he loves the lifestyle. ‘I lead a quiet, simple life when I'm not working. I have a very nice girlfriend and love nothing more than a glass of Rioja and an early night when I'm off duty. I leave all the other sex ‘n' drugs stuff to the type of characters who so often end up coming to me for help.'

But Pete is realistic about his future. He explained: ‘It's getting more and more dangerous out here with cocaine gangsters flooding London from all over the world. That makes it more difficult for investigators like me to operate. I think the time will come when I'll have to think about another career change, but for the moment I'm very happy with my life.'

That influx of foreign cocaine criminals into the UK is clearly moving the goalposts for many home-grown gangsters.

In the Kent countryside, many old-school British gangsters run their cocaine gangs from isolated farmhouses and mansions with easy access to the Channel ports of Dover and Folkestone.

Bernie is one of the most familiar faces in the county and he told me that today's up-and-coming young cocaine barons are in danger of turning the UK into an underworld no-go area.

‘It's all got completely fuckin' out of hand in recent years,' explained Bernie, smoking a king-size cigar and supping a vodka and tonic. ‘The youngsters coming through the ranks now are complete and utter psychos. It's bedlam out there and a lot of innocent people are being knocked off for no good reason. This country is turning into the Wild fuckin' West.'

Bernie, now in his late sixties, believes he is one of the
few ‘old chaps' given any respect by the younger cocaine gangsters in the UK. ‘But that's only 'cos I've got form,' explained Bernie. And by ‘form' he means he's been in prison for killing a criminal rival and was also busted for running one of the UK's biggest cocaine ‘corporations' in the late 1990s.

Bernie insists that he's free to move around the south coast of England without fear of retribution from rival gangsters. ‘In fact some of the so-called new boys come to me for advice,' said Bernie between puffs on his fat cigar. ‘But a lot of my old mates are shit scared to be seen out and about in case they cop a bullet from this lot.'

He went on: ‘I've been in the coke game for thirty years and when I saw some of these foreign villains turning up here a few years back, I told my mates in the business to watch out because where they come from, life is cheap and they've had it hard. That makes them much colder and more inclined to shoot first and ask questions later, if you know what I mean.'

Bernie believes he occupies the ‘middle ground' between the old and the new cocaine barons in the south-east of England.

‘There's a couple of younger outfits working on my manor, so I went to see them and told them that I didn't expect any of them to interfere with my operations and I'd keep out of their stuff. All the other old boys I know said I was barking mad but I reckon it's paid off handsomely. I really do. I sat down with the youngsters and we came to an agreement.
That's all I ever wanted. What's the point in havin' a ruck? It don't help no one, does it?'

When I met Bernie at his favourite pub overlooking a small south coast marina, he claimed he'd just come from a meeting with a man who represented one of the richest oligarchs in Russia. ‘He's on the make like all the rest of them,' explained Bernie, who was wearing a country gent outfit consisting of tweed jacket, checked trousers and brogues. Bernie had met the Russian billionaire's ‘rep' at a nearby safehouse, just up the road from the marina. ‘This bloke had ten bodyguards. Can you believe it? He wanted to invest some of his boss's cash in the coke game and expected me to tell him about what sort of return he could get for his money. I get these type of characters coming to me all the time these days. I tend to avoid them unless they are real pro's because they don't really understand the risks. They just think it's a way to make an easy buck. It's not as simple as that.'

The bar we were talking in was decked out in garish, swirled wallpaper and looked as if it hadn't had a lick of paint since back in the days when Bernie ‘invested' in buying property in the London Docklands development during the reign of Margaret Thatcher.

As we were talking, a burned-out looking blonde woman in her late forties in tight jeans glanced across at Bernie and smiled. He winked back and then continued with his overview of the cocaine gang wars raging in south-east England. ‘It's changing all the time. A lot of the older Brits have left England and retired to Thailand and Costa Rica and places
like that because it's too fuckin' crowded here these days. Spain's too near and it's not cheap to live in any more.'

But how come, if that was the case, Bernie stayed here in the UK? ‘I'm above all these shoot-ups and shit like that. I've been bedded down here for so long I wouldn't know how to survive anywhere else.' And survival is the key word here. For Bernie seems to have an ability to duck and dive his way out of trouble.

He recalled: ‘About a year ago this bunch of Polish coke traffickers turned up in the village near me in Kent and started giving it large in all directions. They rented a farmhouse, a couple of Mercedes and a load of hookers and gave the impression they were made men. Then a gang of Russians I know vaguely got to hear about them.

‘Well, if there's one thing the Russians don't like it's the Poles. They made it their business to run them out of town. These particular Russians employed a team of fruitcake Latvian ex-paratroopers as bodyguards and they charged up the driveway to the Poles' farmhouse one night, sprayed it with bullets and then left a couple of firebombs behind for good measure. The Poles got the message and were never seen again.'

Bernie makes light of it all but there is a serious point to what he is saying. ‘I take the attitude that I can sit back and let them all wipe each other out. Then once the dust has settled maybe I'll stroll back in and grab a few bob.' Bernie says his main priority is to make sure his face doesn't end up looking like he's been in a car crash. ‘I'm what you might
call a diplomat. I pride myself on not clashing with other villains. It just ain't worth it.'

The following Saturday night I found myself in another of Bernie's favourite watering holes, this time in the suburbs of south London. At least half a dozen of the customers reeked of criminality. Most of them were watching the footie on the telly in the corner of the Lounge Bar. Then, as evening drew in, they pulled out their sachets of coke and started getting hyped up.

‘They're all it,' said Bernie, as we sat in a corner of the bar. ‘That's the biggest problem. No one can go out for a quiet pint no more. It's gotta be a bottle of voddie and a packet of Charlie. No wonder there is such demand for the fuckin' stuff. Everyone's on it these days.'

As darkness fell and the chemicals kicked in, some of the villains flexed their muscles a bit and looked around to see who was watching them. The atmosphere in that pub in the south London suburbs was more akin to a scene from
Goodfellas
, with one particularly coked-up little character – who looked a bit like Joe Pesci – marching in and out of the gents virtually every two minutes to replenish his nostrils with white powder.

‘The only reason they don't do it on the table is because you get one or two coppers in here as well,' explained Bernie.

We were in this particular pub to meet Sergi, a ‘foreigner mate' of Bernie's who Bernie reckoned was a ‘a good example of a decent foreign operator, not like the rest of them'.

Sergi turned out to be a Ukrainian ‘businessman' who's
lived in Kent for three years. He clearly adored Bernie and the two seemed close. ‘The trouble with you Brits is that you drink too much and you take too much cocaine,' said Sergi.

Bernie, sitting next to him, laughed loudly. ‘I told you, didn't I?'

Sergi continued: ‘Where I come from we can hold our drink and we don't take drugs because then we are not in control.'

I soon discovered why Sergi was the only non-British man in the pub that night. It turned out that he employed half the gangsters in there to help him run his ‘businesses'.

He explained: ‘I like the Brits. I like your way of life. The loyalty. The humour. I don't trust my countrymen, especially when they're here in UK. They would kill you as soon as look at you if you had something they wanted.'

Sergi then went on to provide a revealing glance inside the foreign cocaine underworld in the south-east of England. ‘People like me see that there are way more opportunities here than in our home countries, so we come here. It is as simple as that.'

He went on: ‘You Brits think you live in such a civilised place with so little crime compared with other countries. Well, let me tell you here and now, it's easier to run a cocaine business here than in my country. Less cops to bribe for starters!

‘You see, people have more money here and that means more opportunities for guys like me. But I am not a typical foreign criminal. I respect this country and I don't want to
turn it into a battlefield. I am afraid others are not as respectful as me.