Cocaine Confidential (30 page)

Many of their mules came from the tiny Caribbean island of St Martin (Saint Maarten) which is divided between French and Dutch authorities. These couriers would fly into European cities such as Paris and Amsterdam. Then the drugs
were transported to the UK by other London-based mules on planes, ferries, buses and trains. Favourite arrival points were London's Eurostar terminal and Victoria Coach Station, where gang members would be waiting to pick up their terrified mules.

Often three mules – completely unaware of each other – were used on each flight and the gang accepted they might have to ‘lose' at least one of them to customs or police. The Bling Blings preferred using drug addicts and impoverished single mothers as mules. Their families would be threatened with harm if they refused and then they'd often be deliberately hooked on free cocaine. Other mules would be used to take suitcases brimming with cash back to the Caribbean – often as much as $100,000 (£57,000) at a time. The gang members were eventually convicted in the UK and sentenced to jail terms ranging between 16 and 27 years; they left behind them a trail of deeply damaged women mules, many of whom had no other connections to crime.

Apart from St Martin, other small Caribbean islands including Eustatius, Saba, Aruba, Bonaire and Curaçao – part of the Netherlands Antilles – have seen drastic increases in cocaine smuggling by mules in recent years.

For many stuck in the poverty trap, being a mule opens up a risky but tempting way out of their misery. A single flight to Schiphol International Airport in Amsterdam from Ghana, via Morocco, in early 2013 carried 32 West Africans, all of whom had swallowed cocaine packets or concealed them in their luggage. Over the past three years, more than
6,000 drug mules have been arrested at the airport or in Amsterdam itself.

Strikingly, there has recently been a dramatic rise in women in their late sixties and seventies being conned into carrying or swallowing cocaine. Typically they're West Africans with no previous criminal convictions who've left their children behind in their home countries to traffic the drugs into the UK. In a heartbreaking twist, it's been suggested that some are already so sick that the prospect of receiving free healthcare completely obviates the threat of being caught.

‘I am convinced that healthcare is a lot of the motivation,' said Olga Heaven, director of Hibiscus, a charity that has drawn plaudits for its attempts to highlight the issues surrounding drug mules. ‘Ninety per cent of the Nigerians have high blood pressure and cholesterol as well as gynaecological problems. We have one case of a woman in her early fifties with a brain tumour, who's lost her eyesight.'

In 2010 a 77-year-old British grandmother was jailed for 13 years for trying to smuggle almost £1m worth of cocaine into the country in her mobility vehicle. Customs officers at the Channel port of Dover found the drug in the old lady's specially adapted Nissan Pathfinder after she arrived from France. The pensioner had suffered a stroke and had diabetes, asthma and hypertension. Her daughter was jailed with her. ‘I don't know anything about that,' she told police after the drugs were discovered. ‘I just went with my daughter. I didn't ask any questions because I'm not a nosy person. I don't smoke or drink. What am I doing with drugs?'

It's also claimed that these days mules are being forced to swallow larger amounts, as much as a total of 1kg in condom-wrapped balls. Olga Heaven from Hibiscus explained: ‘That shows how desperate they are to put their body at such risk. They have no access to social welfare. A child might have been taken ill or the mother can't pay the school fees. Someone will lend her money. When she can't pay it back they apply a kind of duress.'

Meanwhile – with one eye on the increasing arrest rates for mules – South American cartels have even been recruiting London-based Nigerians and Ghanaian ‘reps' to scour the capital looking for gullible potential drug couriers.

In London I tracked down one such classic ‘mule' to find out first hand how the cocaine traffickers recruit and then destroy the lives of so many otherwise innocent people.

Honey has carried out a number of smuggling trips between Jamaica and the UK, where she lives most of the year with her family in north-west London. One time she swallowed thirty pellets of cocaine and made it back to the UK to deliver the coke, despite one of the pullets bursting in her stomach. Now 33, Honey admits that for a while she was hooked on the excitement of being a ‘mule'. Her story is both harrowing and fascinating as she unravels her involvement in the most dangerous side of the cocaine business.

Unlike so many other ‘mules' in the cocaine trade, Honey doesn't suffer from ‘ghetto poverty'. Sure, her life has been hard, compounded by the fact that she has an ageing mother and two teenage children to support. But she certainly isn't on the breadline.

Honey says she had always shunned the world of cocaine, until she met a man in London who turned her on to it and
at the same time turned her into his mule ‘slave'. She says: ‘There's no other way to describe it. I loved this guy and I would do anything for him, even though I'm sure he didn't feel the same way about me. I was putty in his hands.'

Soon after meeting her mystery man, Honey succumbed to the temptation of becoming a cocaine mule. She knew other friends who'd done it on their way back from seeing relatives in the Caribbean. The money was good and, as far as she was concerned, if it kept her man ‘sweet' then it was worth the risk.

‘There are people out there who will read this and think I'm the biggest fool in the world but I really wasn't worried about doing it 'cos everyone else I knew who did it had got away with it. I wanted to go back to Jamaica anyway to see my friends and relatives. It was a dream trip for me. And of course the money was handy,' says Honey.

Within days of agreeing to do her first ‘mule' run, Honey was in Jamaica waiting in a rundown shantytown bar to make contact with a trafficker who worked for a coke gang connected to her lover back in London. Five minutes into the meeting, the man gave her one cocaine pellet and asked her to swallow it. ‘That was the test. If I hadn't been able to swallow it then I wouldn't be able to do the proper job. I started to laugh, because it looked so big like I couldn't swallow it.' But within minutes she'd swallowed two pellets. ‘It was no big deal.'

Then the trafficker gave Honey $500 (£320) to take care of some domestic expenses and to spruce herself up before
she set off back to England the next day. The man told her she'd have to swallow the rest the following morning before she went to the airport.

The packets had been washed in bleach, soaked in a syruplike solution and kept in a refrigerator for several days. Honey believes each packet of cocaine was tested. If a packet floated, that's a sign that it could unravel and leak in the stomach; the swallower would overdose instantly and die. If they sank, they were safe.

‘You have to trust them otherwise you die,' explains Honey. ‘You can drink anything – even hot stuff – with them if they're wrapped properly. When they're not wrapped properly you can't drink anything, you can't eat anything. You gotta be real careful.'

Next day, Honey swallowed the rest in a cheap hotel room. In all it was a total of 75 cocaine pellets.

Honey admits the flight back to London was very stressful. ‘I couldn't stop worrying about what would happen if any of them packages burst.' Honey knew from the trafficker she'd met in Jamaica that the most important thing was not to make any sudden movements.

‘Apparently that would draw suspicion, so I kept as still as I could throughout the flight. It felt very uncomfortable but I didn't want to get caught. I just kept thinking about that cash and how it would help my kids and my mum.'

Honey knew she'd be met at the airport by her lover. ‘That kind of made me feel more secure about it all. It was also
perfect because if I got stopped I could talk to them all about my man, proving that we were properly connected.'

At London's Heathrow airport, her lover immediately took Honey to a house near where they both lived in north-west London. ‘It felt a bit strange going into someone's house but I knew it had to be done.' In the house, her boyfriend offered Honey a laxative and milk to make her bowels move. She took neither, but agreed to go to the bathroom to start the process.

“So he gave me a bucket and gloves and disinfectant and I went into the bathroom. You have to clean them off and wash them off … I did twenty first. It took me about four hours to get all the pellets out. I was so relieved when it was all over.'

Honey expected to be paid £3,000 cash because she'd been told she would get £1,000 for each 25 pellets. Her lover gave Honey £2,500. He'd earlier given her £300 travelling money before the trip.

‘I asked him how come they gave me less money and he said that some were smaller than others. I didn't bother fighting with him …'

Within days, Honey had spent the money on fixing up her mum's house, buying a new TV and some clothes.

It was no big surprise when, a few weeks later, Honey got a call from her lover asking her to do another trip to Jamaica. Honey says she still trusted him, so she agreed to catch the flight. ‘To me, it was just a business. I didn't think about the people whose lives are ruined by cocaine or the heavy guys
who kill people who cross them. I needed the money and this was my way to earn a lot of it.'

Half a dozen further ‘mule' trips followed over the next eighteen months ‘They all went smooth as silk apart from the last time when a sachet split but luckily I got it out in time. But that convinced me to pull back for a bit. It felt as if it was getting more dangerous. More risky.'

Honey's decision to take a break from the mule business caused a lot of friction between her and her lover. ‘I told him I thought I shouldn't push my luck and I was seriously thinking that maybe I should quit while I was still at the top, so to speak. He was furious. He thought he had me under his control and now here I was daring to step back.'

For the following couple of months, Honey went out of her way to avoid her lover in a bid to separate herself from him and his cocaine gang. ‘I deliberately avoided all the places where I thought he might be. I didn't answer his calls. All my mates were telling me to walk away from him but it's not as easy as that. And then there was the money. I'd got used to having some extra cash.'

Late one evening, Honey's lover appeared at her front door demanding to come in. ‘He was high on something and shouting and screaming at me. I knew what he was after and I tried to tell him to come back the next day but he took no notice and just barged in. He said the gang were threatening to kill him for failing to get enough mules to work for him. He made it sound like they were really serious and his life was in danger. I fell for it. God knows why but I did.'

Four days later Honey arrived in Jamaica for what she'd pledged to her family would be the ‘absolute last run'. Three days later she swallowed 100 pellets of cocaine and took off back for London.

Aboard the plane back to London, Honey thought she recognised two of the other women from earlier flights and suspected they might also be mules working for her lover. Honey made a point of not leaving the plane with them after they touched down in London.

Honey got through the main customs area and was just turning the corner towards the exit when she was stopped by customs officials, who immediately asked her if she'd allow them to perform a body search.

Two female customs officers then took Honey into a room and strip-searched her, but found nothing. They searched her luggage carefully but came up dry. Then one examiner told Honey they felt she had something inside her and invited her to do a urine test. She agreed. ‘What else could I do?' she later said.

Then they took her into another room and gave her a blue book with the rights and rules of British customs and immigration laws that she was subject to. Honey says she pushed the book away but they insisted she sign it, which she eventually did. Then they gave her ten cups of water followed by three cups of hot tea.

Honey was then escorted upstairs to a toilet, which was transparent and had a big transparent hose linking it to a sink. ‘I was very scared but I tried hard not to show it. I kept
thinking about my kids and how they'd suffer if I ended up in prison. And of course I finally regretted getting involved in smuggling drugs in the first place. I had been such a fool. I saw my whole life flashing in front of me and I almost burst into tears.'

Honey asked if she could have something to eat but before she could get an answer, the examiner came back with the result of the urine test. ‘I felt exhausted and flat. This was the moment I'd always dreaded and if I hadn't been such a fool and thought I could get away with it one last time, I wouldn't have found myself sitting there waiting for them to put the handcuffs on.'

The examiner stood over Honey and walked around and around the table she was sitting on. ‘The suspense was killing me so I looked up at her and said, “Well?” She looked really pissed off and just mumbled “You're free to leave.”

‘I couldn't believe my ears. I looked at her, waiting for her to say she was kidding but she didn't say another word. I had passed! I have no idea to this day how I got away with it but I did.'

Honey claims she ‘learned a lot of lessons' that day. ‘I finally saw the consequences of my actions. The people who would suffer for my stupidity. It was an awakening in many ways. I went to my lover's house, emptied the contents of my stomach and slapped him harder than I have ever hit anyone in my life. He was so shocked he didn't retaliate. I walked out of there and told him never to contact me ever
again. I'd finally come to my senses and realised he'd been using me all along. What a fool I'd been.'