Neil Woods was the first and best of his kind – an undercover cop whose brief was to infiltrate Britain’s most dangerous drug gangs, befriending the foot soldiers before taking on their gangster bosses.
Starting out in the early 90s and making the rules up as he went, Neil was at the forefront of police surveillance. He quickly earned a name as the most successful operative of his time and his expertise was called upon by drugs squads around the country to tackle an ever-growing problem.
But after years on the streets, spending time with the vulnerable users at the bottom of the chain, Neil began to question the seemingly futile war he was risking both his life and sanity for. What if the real enemy wasn’t who he thought?
Good Cop, Bad War is an intense account of the true effects of the war on drugs and a gripping insight into the high pressure world of British undercover policing.
Neil Woods spent fourteen years (1993-2007) infiltrating drug gangs as an undercover policeman, befriending and gaining the trust of some of the most violent, unpredictable criminals in Britain. With the insight that can only come from having fought on its front lines, Neil came to see the true futility of the war on drugs: that it demonises those who need help, and only empowers the very worst elements in society. Neil is the chairman of LEAP UK, the British chapter of the international organisation Law Enforcement Against Prohibition – an advocacy group exclusively made up of law enforcement officials. He also appeared on Channel 4’s Drugs Live.
For Lynette, the love of my life.
And for Gareth and Tanith, who make me so proud.
It is for our young that we should fight for change.
THE COIN HUNG in the air, daring me to breathe. For a single moment everything just stopped. Then I snapped out my right hand, caught it and slammed it down on the table.
A pause. Two long, deep breaths. Then I lifted my hand away. There it was, heads, the Queen’s profile winking up at me.
So, that was that. I was becoming a cop.
‘Well, if that’s your decision, son, I’m sure you’ll see it through.’
The reaction from my family was pretty much as expected. My father believed in the calm, thoughtful path. Every question could be reasoned out, and whoever lost their temper first also lost the argument. Throughout my entire childhood I don’t think I remember hearing a single voice raised in anger.
My mum was a bit more concerned.
‘The police, Neil? Are you sure that’s for you?’
I could understand her anxiety. I had lasted less than a year on my business studies course at Salford Polytechnic before dropping out and coming back home – not exactly a demonstration of commitment or hard-headed practicality. But even at nineteen I knew that moping around, stacking shelves at Marks & Spencer wasn’t for me. I wanted something more. I needed to prove myself – I needed adventure.
I had originally planned to find that adventure the standard way teenagers did in 1989: by saving up for a Eurorail pass, and fruit-picking my way around Europe while trying to chat up exotic foreign girls. But then I stumbled on the police recruitment ad at the back of the local paper.
At first the idea seemed completely ludicrous, beyond absurd. But something about it struck deep. I found myself daydreaming about this, more than even the topless beaches of Marseille. The thought grew and gnawed at me, becoming almost a fixation. Somehow, deep down, I knew this was something I had to do, that I could never face myself in the mirror if I didn’t step up to the self-imposed challenge.
That’s how I ended up standing at my desk, flipping a coin, with a police recruitment application and a map of southern France laid in front of me. Tails, I was taking off around Europe. Heads, I’d join Her Majesty’s law enforcement.
My girlfriend Sam also seemed bewildered.
‘You… a police officer?’ she squealed with laughter.
‘Yes… I just… ’ I paused and fumbled, searching for the words, before simply blurting out, ‘I just want to help protect people.’
As naïve and silly as I must have sounded, something in my garbled melodramatic phrase struck a chord in our own relationship. Sam and I had met as teenagers. I was at the boys’ school, she was at the girls’, and our paths crossed at parties and school discos – a fairly old-school story. We had a lot of fun in those early days, sneaking bottles of cider with our little gang, discovering the world together – doing all the things young lovers are meant to do. But I also saw something else in Sam. I often felt there was something vulnerable or melancholy about her, something that needed protection. I tried my best to be there when she needed me, and to support her through whatever she was going through. Looking back, I can see that helping Sam also allowed me to feel a sense of purpose. As a kid I’d spent entire days tearing through all the classic adventure books by Bernard Cornwell, C.S. Forester and all the rest. These were stories of men – and they were usually men – doing the right thing in difficult circumstances. That impulse to do the right thing, to come through in the hour of need, defined my early relationship with Sam, but it was also what propelled me towards the police.
Because, truth be told, most other aspects of my character wouldn’t have marked me out as ideal cop material. Aside from reading, my only real obsession was music. I’d burn through every issue of Melody Maker and the NME, before racing to the local library to find the new records by Black Sabbath or the Smiths, along with the old greats like Jimi Hendrix and the Beatles. A friend of mine told me that smoking hash was amazing for listening to records, so we would occasionally score a bit of dope off someone’s older brother, then lie back to listen to the Doors and Yes. As promised, it was pretty amazing.
But this was also the era that saw the birth of the War on Drugs. I watched Ronald Reagan on TV saying that one smoke of crack would get you addicted for life, and believed it without question. Those worlds of addiction and violence seemed a universe away from my friends and me, smoking a bit of weed and listening to rock & roll – but the cowboy-ish, War on Drugs mythology gradually seeped in.
That’s where the idea of joining the police really came from. There were bad people out there preying on the weak and vulnerable, and they needed to be stopped. I wanted to fight the good fight – to catch the bad guys and protect the innocent from vicious criminals. Basically, I was young and naïve, and like most young men setting off on an adventure, this became about discovering who I really was.
It took about six months just to qualify for training. The first interview was at home. The police wanted to know what kind of families their recruits came from. I don’t think mine could have been any more ideal unless my old man had been a copper himself.
If the mythical ‘Middle England family’ that politicians fawn over in their focus groups really exists, we were it. Having been sent to the coalmines during the Second World War, my father had worked his way up to become a regional agent for small businesses around the Midlands and north of England. We lived in Buxton, a picturesque market town just at the edge of the Peak District, and while we certainly weren’t wealthy, we didn’t want for anything either.
In any case, we seemed to pass muster with the Derbyshire Constabulary, and I was invited for further testing.
The first examination was not at all what I had expected. We were split into groups of four and handed a pile of newspaper clippings. We were then told to decide, as a group, which issues were the greatest priorities for UK policing.
This was the summer of 1989 and the country was experiencing the birth of the acid house rave scene. The tabloid press were reacting with typical hysteria, as if a few kids getting loved up and dancing in a field spelled the end of Western civilisation. So, the other guys in my group all put the acid house stories at the top of their list.
Now, this was something I actually knew about. When I had started my business studies course, I had turned up at eighteen-years-old in Manchester, in 1988. This was quite a magical time and place to be alive. I never got into ecstasy, but the music itself had blown me away. A few tokes on a spliff and I could dance all night at the Hacienda with everyone else. One thing I absolutely knew was that ninety-nine per cent of what was written about this scene was bright shining bullshit. It was certainly nowhere near as serious as the other headlines we were presented with in the exam – stories of guns, beatings and real organised crime.
But the other guys in my group were completely adamant, and I realised they weren’t about to change their minds. So I suggested a compromise, treating the rave headlines as a medium priority, and we presented our results.
What I learned later was that the examiners didn’t particularly care what order the clippings went in. What caught their eye was that my first instinct was to suggest a compromise, rather than just sticking blindly to my position. Above all else, an effective police officer needs mental flexibility. You need to be able to adapt and change at a moment’s notice. Out of the twelve people on our examination team, four were selected. I made the cut.
Suddenly everything became very real and very serious. This was it. I really was becoming a cop.
THERE’S NO NICE way to say it: I was crap.
My very first call-out after training was to break up a fight between two groups of known local troublemakers that was kicking off in a pub car park. I did exactly as I had been trained, placing myself between the gangs and trying to de-escalate the situation. ‘Look,’ I began, trying to stare down a massive skinhead almost vibrating with barely contained rage, ‘I’m sure we can all just calm down and—’
I never even finished the sentence. The guy just pushed straight past me and drove his fist hard into the face of one of the rival gang members. The entire crowd immediately exploded, and the rest of my team had to pile in to break up the melee, sustaining several minor injuries on the way.
That brawl should never have even started. I had failed to project authority. And in a tense situation, a cop who can’t assert authority can be more dangerous than no cop at all. Once people lose faith in the idea of the police, things can spiral into anarchy very quickly – especially when everyone is a bit pissed.
I just couldn’t seem to find my place. The constant split-second decision-making was almost impossible, and I was no good with violent confrontation. I had been brought up to reason things out, to talk issues through and find common ground. This is generally a positive approach, but not much use when trying to break up a pitched battle between pissed-up hooligans outside a pub.
In those first few months, situations that could have been resolved spun out of control. Criminals who should have been caught easily got away, leading to complex and expensive manhunts. And I found myself called into my sergeant’s office for dressing-downs and poor performance reviews. I was on the edge of losing my job before I had even really started.
There was also the culture shock. I had moved from Buxton, an unpretentious, pleasant little market town, to Allenton, a grim suburb of Derby, built from mile after mile of funereal post-war council blocks. It was impossible to tell where the grey of the concrete ended and the grey of the sky began. Allenton had the highest crime rate in the county, and from the distress calls we received at the station, the favourite pastime seemed to be domestic violence. I found myself called out over and over again to arrest my own neighbours, only to have to return home there later that evening.
By now, Sam had moved out of her parents’ house and was living with a friend in Manchester, so I’d get to go and see her at weekends. But Sunday evening always meant sitting alone back at my digs in Allenton, dreading the cycle in to work the next day.
But the most extreme culture shock didn’t come from the neighbourhood – it came from the police force itself.
Very early in my training I was walking across our station car park with some guys from my team when we passed a dog-handler from the Canine Unit standing around with his giant Alsatian. Of course the dog surged forward, barking and straining at the lead. We all jumped back, but the handler, a white South African guy, just laughed and said ‘Oh don’t worry lads, I’ve trained him to only bite the nig-nogs.’ I was completely stunned. I had never heard anything like that before in my life. This was still the era of apartheid. Hearing that sentence, in that accent, from someone supposedly fighting on my own side, was nauseating. Even more disturbing was the fact that no one else in the group objected. Everyone just sort of giggled and walked on, accepting that this was just how things were.
Of course there were good people in Derby, and they did a lot of important work. But just through sheer overwork, there was also a widespread atmosphere of cynicism, indifference and casual racism. From my very first days there, I’d see my superiors rolling their eyes as if the public were just irritating extra paperwork, or worse, fundamentally bad people.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, as a department our statistics weren’t very good at all. With a slight change in the ‘just get through the day’ mentality, we could have done so much better – not that I was much help with my own bumbling.
I had joined the police to fight the good fight, but I was beginning to realise that I had been very naïve. Now I was crashing hard against real life and the gritty practicalities of the job. When that dog-handler had dropped his ‘nig-nogs’ line, I hadn’t taken some sort of principled stand. I was unsure of myself, and conscious of being the new guy. I didn’t want to start calling out cops who’d been on the force for years. These were my new colleagues and superiors, so I kept my mouth shut and got on as best I could. But that didn’t feel right either. How did my own silence fit into that self-image as the guy fighting the good fight?
I came to the verge of quitting many times. But somehow I knew that just couldn’t happen. I had joined the police to prove something to myself. I wasn’t going to walk away at the first sign of difficulty. There was always a little voice inside telling me to just grit my teeth, to get through it. It became a point of inner pride that no matter how bad things got, I could take it.
But I also knew that I had to do something to improve the situation.
‘Listen Alex, do me a favour mate, I need to get smacked in the face.’
‘You fuckin’ what?’ Alex looked at me like I’d lost my mind.
‘Look, I can’t keep up here – take me down the gym and teach me some boxing. I need to know how to take a punch. Come on mate, help me out.’
Alex was one of the other recruits who had joined up with me. He was also a talented boxer who had won silver in the Amateurs. I figured this was as good a place to start as any.
The gym was basically a converted garage with a few heavy bags, some Sugar Ray Leonard posters and the smell of stale sweat, but my wish came true – I definitely learned how to take a punch. It was hard going at first, but I was keen and fairly physically fit, and eventually became quite a handy long-range counterpuncher.
The boxing definitely helped my confidence in general, but the improvement in my working life was slow. Halfway through my two-year probation period it was still the same old story: ‘Woods, you’re with Sergeant Hornby this month,’ ‘Woods, why don’t you go with Sergeant Picknett for a bit.’ I didn’t need to be a genius to tell that officers were trying to palm me off on one another. I was hanging on by a thread.
Eventually, I was transferred to Sergeant James McCarthy, an older Scottish officer who spoke with a gentle Perthshire lilt. It was McCarthy who first saw something in me. He recognised, well before I did, that I actually might have something to bring to the job. Gradually, he helped me learn to play to my strengths.
I found my stride in the interview room. I discovered I had a talent for extracting confessions from suspects, even hardened criminals who had faced down much more experienced officers.
I could read people. That little flicker of the eye; the way they tapped their foot a little faster when they were getting angry; the little bead of sweat that formed on their forehead as they got nervous or were caught in a lie. Squeezing confessions is a massively useful skill in the police force. If you can convince a criminal to confess at the interview stage, you save everyone the time and expense of a lengthy investigation and trial.
Over time, detectives from CID actually started coming up and saying things like ‘Bloody hell, are you the one who got a confession out of that bloke? Well done mate, we’ve been trying to crack him for years.’ None of my colleagues in uniform seemed to notice – to them police work just meant making arrests and banging heads together. But it was the CID guys that I really looked up to. If I had a future on the force, I already knew it lay in that direction.
I became Sergeant McCarthy’s go-to guy for suspect interviews and witness statements. My detection rate actually grew to become one of the best on the squad.
But while it was a relief to finally find a role, I still didn’t fit into the brash, abrasive culture at Derby. As my probation period drew to a close, I knew I would squeak through with the bosses, but I wasn’t sure I even wanted the job. So, when I happened to spot an ad for a position in Glossop, North Derbyshire, on the station noticeboard, I told myself I would apply and give it a go in another setting. If I didn’t get the position, I would quit.
My acceptance letter from Glossop arrived the same day as the news that I had passed my probation. I folded the letter and stuck it in my pocket with a sigh. It looked like I was still a cop.
I REPORTED FOR duty on my first 6 a.m. to 2 p.m. shift, and found myself thrown straight into a murder inquiry. Someone had been beaten to death outside a rough pub in Hadfield, the neighbouring town.
As the new guy, I was given the job of guarding the crime scene. On any investigation, anyone who enters or leaves the scene must be meticulously logged and follow a very specific path so as not to interfere with forensics. Any tiny mistake and a defence lawyer can have a field day in court tearing apart your laboriously collected evidence.
So, I stood there all day with a clipboard, marking when the specialist units came and went. It’s a necessary and important role, but also generally acknowledged as the most boring job in British policing.
But it did give me the opportunity to observe my new department at work. I was blown away. The entire squad acted with painstaking professionalism and attention to detail. To be fair, the guys at Derby would probably have got the job done too, but with the Glossop team there was never a hint of cynicism or arrogance. Questions would come up and I’d instinctively cringe, waiting for someone to crack the inevitable crass one-liner, but it never came. In fact, the team at Glossop conducted themselves with more than just professionalism – they acted with actual care.
This was how I’d imagined police work when I had signed up at nineteen. People were thinking things out, building a timeline of the incident and putting together a suspect profile – all while taking care of some quite traumatised witnesses.
Over the following few weeks my impressions of the Glossop team only multiplied. They quickly tracked and arrested the pub murderer, and consistently showed themselves to be brilliant, principled, hard-working people who cared deeply about the job. For the first time in my life I felt like I was exactly where I needed to be.
Two weeks into my reassignment to Glossop, I was sent out on my first solo foot patrol. It was a busy Saturday night as I paced the town in my clumpy regulation shoes and one of the awful, sweaty rubber macs they made us wear in those days.
Completely by chance, I turned down an alley behind the local club at exactly the right moment to see some big lug raise a brick and smash it through the back window. There was a moment of silence as our eyes locked. I looked at him, he looked at me. Then he turned and ran.
I heard myself shout, ‘Stop! Police!’
Of course he didn’t stop. No one ever does. I had one split-second of self-awareness to think, ‘Oh God, did I actually just say that?’ before sprinting off in pursuit.
We raced round the corner and down another alley, before he realised he wasn’t getting away. He turned and swung at me. I ducked, taking the blow on my helmet. Then, acting completely on instinct, I sidestepped left, threw my hip into his and slammed him hard onto the ground, exactly as I had been trained. Before I even realised what I was doing, I was snapping on the handcuffs and reading him his rights.
This was an important moment for me. When I threw that big guy to the floor, I had felt a little surge of adrenaline, but no panic. In fact, I had felt weirdly calm, as if the world had suddenly slowed down. It was a big step for me to realise that not only could I keep my cool in stressful situations, but that a cop can apply serious force both ethically and intelligently.
Not only could I do this job, I could do it well.
From that moment I was making arrests of hostile suspects left, right and centre. It actually got to the point where my sergeant had to tell me to cool off. One Saturday night in town I made four arrests, two for common assault and two for criminal damage. In each incident people had been injured, and these arrests were absolutely necessary. But, on the Monday morning, Sergeant Hanford approached my desk. ‘Woods, my office please.’
I instinctively cringed, remembering the dressing-downs I had received in Derby.
‘So, Woods, these four arrests you made on Saturday evening?’
‘Yes sir.’
‘You really can’t muck about like that, you know.’
‘But sir, those were serious crimes in progress.’
‘Listen Woods, I know you trained in Derby but that’s a big city. If a situation escalates, backup can be there in minutes. Things are different here. Where you were the other night, no one would have been able to reach you. You need to think ahead in these situations, Woods… we don’t do your big-city ways around here.’
He raised his eyebrows to inject a little humour; I think we both knew it was odd I was getting told off for doing the job too well. But he was absolutely right, and it was another reminder that good police work isn’t about rushing in and bashing heads, it’s about thinking ahead and maintaining absolute tactical discipline.
But, sergeants are nothing if not competitive. My record of arrests made my superiors look good. So, despite his admonitions, Hanford made sure I was rewarded. He recommended me for the Advanced Driving Course. In those days courses and specialised training were often given out to reward outstanding work. It’s an excellent way to incentivise people and expand their skills. Unfortunately, cuts have now made this impossible. Courses are now only offered to officers who will definitely need them, so Traffic Division might get on the Advanced Driving Course, but it would generally be off-limits to regular PCs.
This is a shame because that course was a godsend for me. It meant I could step up and start manning the Rapid Response car, a whole new education in high-intensity police work. Jez Radway, the officer generally responsible for the Rapid Response car, was one of the most intelligent and principled people I met during my entire time on the force, and became a real mentor. It was Jez who took me aside one day and mentioned that if I wanted to apply for a placement with the Drugs Squad, he would write in support of my application.
This was huge.
Throughout the 1990s Britain was awash with narcotics. The fall of the Berlin Wall and opening of the Eastern Bloc had created a heroin superhighway from Central Asia. Crack had exploded out of the American ghetto and begun squeezing the life out of our own inner cities. Meanwhile, the ascendancy of dance music and the rave scene meant that MDMA, amphetamine and cannabis were the fuel that kept the engine of youth culture running.
This led to massive political pressure on police forces to crack down on the drugs trade. And that meant bigger budgets for Drugs Squads all over the country. A force’s Drugs Squad, or DS, were always the guys with the best kit, the flashiest cars and the most experienced detectives. It was where any smart, ambitious young cop wanted to be. But most would have to wait years. Getting the tap was obviously a gesture of approval from the higher-ups – and I jumped at the chance to prove myself.
The initial reception was a little disappointing.
The officers on the Drugs Squad absolutely hated these month-long attachments. This was a tight-knit group of experienced detectives, involved in long, complex investigations. For them, being sent a new regular PC just meant another bumbling plod they had to babysit.
So, I spent my first morning the same way as every single other officer on attachment – they took me out to the car park to show me their radio communications kit, then all had a good laugh when I stuck my finger in my ear as if I was in some Hollywood movie. This is a classic newbie error. Obviously, if you’re undertaking surveillance, the last thing you do is walk around with your finger in your ear like a cartoon spook. The equipment works just fine on its own; the finger-in-the-ear routine was just cooked up by film-makers because it looks cool onscreen.
By now I had learned to expect a ribbing from the more experienced cops, and took it with a laugh. That afternoon though, everything became extremely serious, as I got my first taste of the DS at work.
Intelligence had come in that a high-profile dealer was going to be shifting several kilos of cocaine that afternoon. After some discussion, the decision was made not to interrupt the move, but to simply observe and gather what info we could about his operation. This would be a full-surveillance deployment, which meant a convoy of five cars, out for six hours, with an outrider on a motorbike to cover any emergency gaps in visibility.
Covert surveillance is a fine art, and these guys were masters. We acquired our target, and with complex, split-second coordination, one car flawlessly made way for another in convoy, so as not to alert him he was being followed.
‘Alpha 3 with the visual on West Green Avenue. We’ll pursue till next set of lights, then hand over. Can we get someone in position please?’
‘Roger that. Alpha 1 in position, ready for takeover at lights.’
‘Alpha 2 here. We’ve got the eyeball. Target indicating left, we’re going to have to overshoot. Backup from Alpha Bike please.’
‘Alpha Bike ready.’
These guys would speed to 140mph just to be able to take their next position, all while planning several steps ahead like chess masters. I was in awe. This wasn’t locking up drunken idiots on the street; this was dynamic, highly targeted, intelligence-led police work.
Then we ran into trouble.
Our target pulled over, ditched his car and walked into a council estate. There was no way in by road, and we had lost our line of sight.
‘Shit!’ exclaimed Rob, one of the experienced detectives up front. ‘There could be any number of exits from that bloody estate, and we’ve got no idea what he’s even doing in there.’
‘I’ll go in.’ I didn’t hesitate for a second.
Rob snapped his head round sharply.
‘What?’
‘I’ll go in on foot, see where he goes and where the exits are… don’t worry, I can do it.’
The two detectives exchanged a glance, then Rob just shrugged. ‘Well, go on then, what are you waiting for?’
I leapt out of the car, then slowed my walk and hunched my shoulders as if trying to keep off the cold. I turned the corner into the estate just in time to see our target entering a house on the right. I walked by slowly, keeping my eyes fixed on the ground, but making a note of the house number. I radioed the team under my breath: ‘This is Alpha Foot. Suspect has entered house number 47. The only exits are Alpha 2’s current position, and directly opposite. Move one car there and we’ll have him pinned. I’ll maintain current position in case he leaves on foot.’
‘Roger that, Alpha Foot,’ came the reply in my earpiece, ‘good work.’
The rest of the operation went smoothly. We picked him up as he left the estate, now carrying two large sports bags, and followed him to his drop-off point. That deployment yielded a lot of valuable intelligence, especially about house number 47, which turned out to be the hub of a significant local cocaine network.
It also won me some grudging respect from the DS team, and over my month-long attachment they used me as their foot guy several more times. I was young and fresh-faced enough that no dealer would ever take me for an experienced DS detective. I also had an eye for detail and an ability to blend into my surroundings. I was slowly discovering a talent for surveillance work.
But what most fascinated me was how the Drugs Squad would use informants to build a picture of how the narco trade operated in a particular area. They would pick someone up on a minor possession charge, then offer to ‘not write it up’ if they became a regular source of usable intelligence. Occasionally they would even throw in a bit of money. It was amazing how quickly they were able to compile and analyse their data in order to map how the supply networks operated.
This was where I found my place – the same instincts that made me effective in interviewing suspects also helped me in recruiting informants. A lot of these guys were types who were more into music than football, and I was sometimes able to talk to them on more of a level than even the other DS detectives.
It was a point of pride for the Drugs Squad that they only went after high-level gangsters and organised crime groups – or OCGs as they called them. Each of these guys was a veteran copper, with stories of major busts, gunfights and taking down heavy gangsters.
Rob, in particular was an amazing guy. Officers are usually limited to five years in any specialist team. The bosses say this is to deal with stress and fatigue, but it has as much to do with preventing corruption. Rob was so talented, however, they’d given him a second tour of duty.
Soon enough my attachment ended and I was rotated back into regular uniformed police work; it was a major comedown. But a couple of months later, Rob popped in and sat across my desk.
‘Listen, Neil, do you fancy coming back and doing some more work with the DS?’
I tried to contain my excitement. ‘Well yeah, certainly. But it’ll be difficult to square with the bosses. I’ve done an attachment already.’
‘All right, look – apply again, but do it through Sergeant Kotchie, not Hanford. I’ll have a word and fix the paperwork so it goes through.’ I didn’t need to be asked twice.
What I didn’t know was that the DS already had a plan for me. A few days into my new deployment Rob turned and very casually dropped a question that would change the entire course of my life. ‘So, Neil, don’t suppose you fancy trying your hand at doing some buying, do you?’
Undercover operations were still very new, and rarely employed, in British narcotics enforcement. The Derbyshire DS had only used the tactic once or twice, but had scored a major success the previous year when an officer named Webby had made a splash in the local paper after busting a high-level crack dealer.
There was increasing political pressure at the time on all forces to stamp down on crack in particular. Not a week went by without some story in the press about the horrors of the drug, often with more than a hint of racial bias. The politicians needed to be seen to be ‘doing something’, and they spun that pressure onto the police.
For whatever reason, I was the guy they turned to. I agreed without a second thought. My experiences with the Drugs Squad were the best I’d had so far on the force and I wanted in.
The target was a known local hard-man named Danny Anderson. He had a constant stream of sketchy people coming and going from his house, so we set up an observation point with a video recorder across the street and off I went. That was it. There was no training, or even advice. It was just, ‘All right Neil, here’s twenty quid, go buy some crack… Don’t let on you’re a copper, and find out what you can.’
Adrenaline makes me calm. It slows everything down. When I walked up to the shabby red-brick house I felt in absolute control. I was also young and stupid, and had no idea how dangerous what I was doing really was. Sometimes ignorance can be a powerful weapon.
I rang the bell and a young guy answered, wearing torn jeans and a wife-beater vest.
‘Uhh hi,’ I began sheepishly, ‘is Danny about?’
‘What you want? Who are you?’ the guy snapped aggressively.
This threw me. I was so unprepared I hadn’t even worked out a cover story. I just froze. For a moment I was in real trouble. The young guy just peered at me curiously. ‘You a student or something?’
‘Yeah. I’m a student, yeah.’ I shuffled and looked at the ground self-consciously, relief flooding through me.
I managed to steal a glance into the house. There was a woman glowering at me from the darkness. She must have been about thirty years old, wearing a stained tracksuit, with a wild-eyed expression and missing half her teeth.
The young guy looked me up and down once more, then said, ‘Wait here,’ and slammed the door. I kicked my heels for a few seconds, not really knowing what to do with myself. Then the door swung open again. There was Danny Anderson, a big West Indian guy with long dreadlocks, also wearing a wife-beater. The toothless woman was still hovering in the hallway, glaring out. ‘You dis student, den? You wantin’ a ting, bwah?’ Danny asked in a thick Jamaican patois.
‘Yeah… a “ting”, yeah,’ I repeated, almost under my breath.
He paused and gave me the once-over. ‘Right, come over ’ere den.’
Danny led me across the street into an alley. Then he turned towards me and opened his hand to reveal eight small paper twists. ‘Go on, den.’
I took one of the twists, and on instinct began to unwrap it to have a look. ‘Oi there’s nowt wrong wi’ dat,’ Anderson snapped, as if genuinely offended that I would doubt his product. I hurriedly stuffed it in my pocket, handed him the twenty quid and turned to go.
Following the plan, I walked straight back to the police station to get the evidence to our drugs lab. That’s how naïve and amateurish those early operations were. There is no way an undercover operation should be run from an actual police station – in fact, it’s completely insane. All it takes is the wrong person to walk by and spot you coming or going, and you’re a dead man.
But on that day, I strolled back quite pleased with myself. Rick ‘Johnno’ Johnson, who had been manning the observation point, was out of breath, having sprinted to get back before me to show off the video. Seeing how nonchalant I was, Johnno gave me a slap on the back. ‘Look at this guy – it’s like he’s just been out to get the fucking papers.’ The entire squad crowded around to congratulate me. It was a big moment.
The next time out though, things got a little more complicated…
The door swung open to reveal the woman with the missing teeth. She glared out at me with a twitchy, wired expression in her bloodshot eyes.
‘Is Danny about?’ I muttered, trying not to stare at her gums as she slobbered and gurned.
‘Not in!’ she shouted, and violently slammed the door in my face.
I suppose at that point I could have wandered back to the station and tried again another day. But I had come out to score some crack, and that’s what I was going to do. So, I just sort of wandered around the neighbourhood asking anyone who looked a bit crackhead chic if they knew where Danny was.
Looking back, I can’t believe I pulled this off. Within two years such an obvious stunt would get an undercover operator beaten or killed. But in those early days the addicts and dealers were as naïve as we were. Eventually though, some guy with gaunt cheeks and a complexion like overcooked meat went, ‘Yeah, try the bookies, he’s always hanging about in there.’
I walked into the little council estate bookie joint, and straight into a cloud of ganja smoke so thick it made my eyes water. The place was rammed with dreadlocked West Indian guys getting stoned and watching football on the wall-mounted TVs. I stood out like a very skinny, very white, sore thumb. Within thirty seconds I was surrounded.
‘What you doing here, bruv?’
‘Uhh… I’m just looking for Danny.’
‘What you wantin’ Danny for? Danny not here, man.’
‘I just want to buy a ting, Y’know… a stone?’ I shuffled in place awkwardly, keeping my eyes fixed on the floor.
One of the bigger guys stepped forward and jabbed his finger aggressively into my shoulder.
‘What you doin’ just comin’ in ’ere for asking for tings? Who are you, bruv? Where you from?’
‘I dunno,’ I stammered, ‘I’m a student, I’m not really from around here. I just want a stone y’know… I’ve got money.’
The fact that I felt seriously intimidated, and that my eyes were streaming from the choking weed smoke, probably helped me look more convincing as an addict on the rattle.
The big guy gave a contemptuous snort. ‘Boy, you wan’ a stone, I’ll sell you a fuckin’ stone – you don’t need no Danny.’ With that he reached into his pocket and offered me up a plastic wrap.
‘Cheers,’ I blurted as I grabbed the package and handed over the money.
‘Yeah boy. I’m Freaky Man… you wan’ stones, you come see, boy.’
By the time I got back to the station, Johnno was actually shaking. I hadn’t even thought of it, but of course when I had wandered off to the bookies, I’d gone out of observation. He’d had no eyes on me, and had immediately assumed I was in a derelict garage somewhere with a gun to the back of my head.
‘Don’t worry, mate, I bought the stuff off another guy down the bookies.’ I flourished my wrap of crack.
‘No Neil – you don’t understand!’ he thundered. ‘We’re not fucking playing here… last time Danny Anderson thought he had an informant, he stabbed the guy eleven times through the chest… And that’s just the one we know about – these people don’t fuck around, Neil.’
That was a wake-up call. I knew we were chasing bad guys but I hadn’t quite registered just how brutal the drugs game really was.
Later that night I looked over Danny Anderson’s record. He had a string of attacks to his name. He’d been sent down for GBH with Intent, but in my book he was lucky not to have been charged with attempted murder. I felt a strange sense of pride. These guys were nasty and I had to watch my step – but I also somehow knew that I could outsmart them.
After my encounter at the bookies, my face was known. I scored at Danny Anderson’s house a few more times, then hung around outside the bookies until I just happened to run into Freaky Man again – but this time with Johnno around to catch it on video.
Finally, the entire Drugs Squad was called in for a briefing, and we planned out the arrest phase.
The morning of the bust I took a few banknotes, copied down their serial numbers, ran them through the photocopier and logged it all in my evidence book. I then went and scored a rock of crack off Freaky Man and Danny Anderson in turn. As I left Anderson’s place and turned the corner, I passed a crew of twelve uniformed officers in body armour. I didn’t even turn round as I heard the screech of tyres and the sirens start to wail.
This was the biggest crack bust the Derbyshire force had ever brought home. Fifteen properties were simultaneously raided, with seven separate stashes discovered, along with eight massive cannabis hauls.
At Freaky Man’s place another dealer attempted to escape by jumping out of a second-floor window, and ended up being bailed to hospital with smashed-up ankles. Freaky Man himself also turned out to have prior GBH convictions, and both he and Danny Anderson got significant prison sentences. The woman I had encountered at Anderson’s house turned out to be his girlfriend; she apparently just sat on the sofa, smoking crack all day as Danny cut it up.
The bust made it to the front pages of the local papers, and overnight I became a bit of a star on the Drugs Squad. It was a new and strange feeling to suddenly have elite detectives walking up and randomly slapping me on the back. What I didn’t know then, amidst the backslapping and celebratory pints, was that it would never be this easy again – or that I could never celebrate my achievement with anyone else.
The evening we wrapped the investigation, the Drugs Squad Detective Sergeant, Jim Horner, gave me a lift home. Just as we pulled up outside my house, he grabbed my arm.
‘You did well with this Neil. Are you interested in any more of these jobs?’
‘Definitely sir, of course,’ I replied eagerly.
‘Right. Well in that case you can’t tell anyone what we’ve done here. And I mean anyone. Not your family; not your girlfriend; not your mates at the station. The only thing an undercover has is their anonymity. If your name becomes known, there’s no way you can ever do another job with us.’
‘Well, I can tell other cops, can’t I?’ I asked in disbelief. I had been rather looking forward to bragging about my exploits.
Jim gave a derisory snort.
‘Neil, uniformed coppers leak like fucking sieves – and the bloody CID as well. You tell one guy, he’ll tell his mate – and the next thing you know, we send you out undercover, but now some gangster knows your name or your face – and you end up discovered in a car boot somewhere in the Pennines. Do I make myself clear? You tell no one.’
‘Yes sir, I get it.’
I walked to my front door, took a deep breath, and got ready to pretend that I had just had a completely normal day at work.
As satisfying as it was bringing those convictions in, before I could even think about taking on another undercover job I had issues to deal with at home.
It was now 1991, I’d finished probation a few months earlier and Sam had moved up to Glossop with me. We’d found a beautiful old cottage in the old town, covered in lush green creeping ferns, a real romantic little hideaway. For a while I felt giddily happy.
Sam found a job with a chemicals company and also started a one-day-a-week degree in Manchester, where she was doing well. The fresh start seemed to be good for both of us. As my own communication skills improved at work, so did my ability to play my protector-role, talking her round when I thought she was feeling down and reassuring her that everything would be OK.
We had been in Glossop several months before I noticed the change in atmosphere.
Derbyshire cops like a drink, and I would often go out for an after-work beer with the rest of my team at the end of shift. But when I opened the cottage door I would often find Sam standing in the hallway holding a glass of wine, looking unimpressed and demanding to know where I’d been – particularly if I had gone out with any female officers.
I could sense a hard edge in Sam’s voice, and always tried to keep my tone as calm as possible and explain that I was just out for a drink with the guys, and there was nothing at all suspicious going on. And it was the absolute truth. I was still completely in love with Sam and, at this point at least, totally uninterested in chasing other women. I’d even been planning to ask Sam to marry me – though I found this new tension developing between us profoundly troubling.
But I tried to push my concerns aside. We were just adjusting to our new way of life. And whatever happened, I was a cop who had just cracked his first undercover case – even if I could never tell the ones I loved, I felt I could take on the world.
JIM HORNER SAUNTERED up, sat on the corner of my desk and leaned in conspiratorially.
‘All right Neil? The Derby DS have a little situation going on… we’ve basically figured out who’s running crack and heroin for all of South Derby, but we haven’t been able to get anything on him with surveillance. We thought it might be an idea for you to have a whirl?’
‘Yeah, absolutely.’
Having been rotated back to uniformed PC work for a few months, I felt an immediate surge of adrenaline at the thought of another undercover operation.
‘Only thing is, Neil,’ Jim continued, ‘I don’t think we can get you another formal secondment – you’d have to do this one on your rest days.’
I gave a pointed glance at the pile of paperwork on my desk.
‘Fuck it. I’m in.’
‘Good lad. Come in Thursday for a briefing.’ Jim gave me an approving slap on the back, and he was off.
The target was Bigga Williams. Looking over the surveillance photographs it was easy to see how he earned the name. This guy wasn’t just fat; he was planetary. Almost as important a target was his main lieutenant, a seriously nasty character named Meshawn, connected to a string of stabbings and other assaults.
As we were going through the briefing, Johnno piped up, ‘Chief, don’t you think it’s a bit risky sending Neil out in Derby? He was a uniformed copper here a year ago, people will know his face.’
Jim gave it some thought. ‘Well, anyone who would recognise him is probably in prison now, anyway. I’m sure it’ll be fine.’
Still, at least for this job, the team had set up an autonomous headquarters in a disused office space at the edge of town, so I wouldn’t have to report directly back to the police station.
Another thing I insisted on was that I wouldn’t work under observation.
This was a very different scenario than the Danny Anderson job. There was no Intel on how Bigga ran his operation, and no known address. I’d have to figure everything out from the ground up. I needed to be able to move around at will, to get to know people and work my way in. It would be far too restrictive to always be worrying about maintaining visual contact and not sending Johnno into a panic. Video evidence was the endgame. We could get these guys on tape only after I had got my face known and established trust.
Almost to my surprise, the whole team nodded and agreed to work my way. In those days there were no protocols to follow, but a lot of what we improvised back then eventually became the standard that the force still follows – or at least is meant to follow – to this day.
So, the hunt began. I spent days trudging through the grey Midlands drizzle, beating a circuit around the dingy, blighted South Derby council estates where Bigga was known to operate.
It took about a week before I caught a glimpse.
Bigga liked to play the big-time dealer, tooling around in a flash Mercedes with an air of untouchable swagger. At first I just watched, hanging out on street corners and in shop doorways, a baseball cap pulled low over my forehead. I’d thrown together a junkie outfit from a local charity shop, and made myself indistinguishable from every other skinny, pasty addict haunting the streets.
With some careful observation, though, I was able to put together a basic picture of Bigga’s movements. It wasn’t until my sixth time out that I even attempted to score. I waited outside one of Bigga’s safe houses until he arrived and disappeared inside with one of his lieutenants. This wasn’t Meshawn, but an almost equally unpleasant character named Carlo who I recognised from the Intel photos.