Dopeworld: Adventures in the Global Drug Trade

Prelude

The police had already taken away the body, but the blood and brains were still fresh on the sidewalk. We’d been eating at a restaurant just a few blocks away when my partner looked up from his phone and said someone’s been shot down the street. We got up and raced towards the sirens. The man whose cerebrum was now all over the floor had been the owner of a nearby scrap-metal shop. As the cops cleared the crime scene, a bystander lit two candles in memory of the deceased, the tiny flames reflecting in a puddle of sticky red ooze. Just another night in Manila.

While we didn’t know if this was a drug-related homicide, the MO was the same as thousands of other killings that had taken place across the archipelago since Duterte came to power. Witnesses saw two men fire two shots before fleeing on motorbikes into the urban jungle, their safe getaway guaranteed by the rush-hour traffic.

I’d come to the Philippines to investigate the drug war being waged by President Rodrigo Duterte, who’d vowed to cleanse the country of drugs by any means necessary. The story of the Filipino Drug War resonates with me, because, under another set of circumstances, I could have been the one lying there with a bullet lodged in my skull. I used to be a drug dealer, until one day I stupidly took my stuff on the London Tube and got busted by the Met’s canine squad, which earned me a free year-long stay at Her Majesty’s Prison in Isis (South London, not Syria). With an uninspired menu, rude staff, slow room service and guests unable to leave their rooms twenty-three hours a day, suffice it to say that this place wouldn’t get a good rating on TripAdvisor.

This isn’t another true-crime story. I’ve always been more of a geek than a gangster, so if you picked this up expecting the millionth book about the Krays, my condolences. This is a true-crime, gonzo, social, historical-memoir meets fucked-up travel book.

A warning: some of you may find this uncomfortable. But remember, you’re reading the perspective of a drug dealer. Since I’ve been known to be wrong about many things (especially the police presence on the Central line), I’ve travelled the world to hear perspectives other than my own: if I only talked to those who thought like me, this would be a very boring read.

We will explore our curious relationship with those plants, pills and powders that play with our minds, how and why we’ve tried to stamp them out of existence, and what the consequences of that may be. How come a gram of coke can land you in handcuffs, but you can buy beer and cigs at any corner shop? Why are so many kids dying, and why are our prisons filling up? Why does every society have an underclass whose chief source of employment seems to be black-market pharmaceuticals? Why do gangsters apparently control entire neighbourhoods, and in some cases, entire countries? And what, if anything, is going to change?

Welcome to dopeworld.

Part 1

Rise and Fall

(but mostly Fall)

1

From Russia with Drugs

I was born in St Petersburg, Russia, or Leningrad as we called it in the good old days. I come from a family with a long academic tradition: my dad’s a professor, his dad’s a professor, and my mum teaches economics. Just then the Soviet Union was becoming one big shit-sandwich, so we emigrated first to Italy, then to America, where I learnt English from the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, and finally to Bath, a small boring town in the British countryside that doubles as a film-set whenever the BBC want to do a costume drama.

Because we moved around a lot, I was always the new kid in school. I was a nerd with a weird accent who loved watching films; I had no hand/leg/eye co-ordination, which made me shit at most sports; and my eyesight was fucked so I wore thick prescription glasses. As you can imagine, none of that endeared me much to the school’s social hierarchy. All I wanted was to be normal and accepted for who I was, but every time someone made fun of my accent (even though I spoke perfect English – thanks, TMNT!) or I was excluded from a social activity, it reinforced my view that I’d never really be accepted by anyone. Over time this became a sort of self-fulfilling prophecy. I actually got so much shit for how I talked that I can’t bear to hear the sound of my own voice, even today.

Until, one day, I decided the next motherfucker to chat shit to me, I’m gonna knock him dead. This kid on the playground, Mickey Foreskin, was always a pain in the ass. I don’t remember why they called him Mickey Foreskin and I’m not sure I want to find out, but he was definitely an ugly motherfucker. So one fateful lunchtime I was just out and about, minding my own business and eating my Petits Filous, when Mickey literally jumped from behind some bushes and started crooning ‘Nikolai, the Russian Spy!’ in a sneering imitation of my accent.

I came in like Bruce Lee; fists, knees and elbows flying. He tried to get away but I got him up against the fence and kept pounding. And pounding. And pounding. And then I stopped. Silence.

‘Get the fuck outta here.’

Limping and crying like a little bitch, I pushed him away and looked around. I was so caught up in the moment that I hadn’t noticed the whole playground staring at me, their mouths wide open in shock. All of a sudden, I heard someone chanting: ‘Niko! Niko!’

It got louder.

‘NIKO! NIKO !’

Everyone joined in. I lifted my arms in triumph.

After that little incident, I was suspended for a week, but something in me clicked. Beating the shit out of that kid felt good. For the next few weeks everyone respected me. Both my parents were academics, but I didn’t wanna go down that same road. It seemed a little too ‘nice’, a little too ‘safe’. I didn’t want to work nine to five as a corporate slave, writing reports I don’t give a shit about to make someone else rich, then marry and have 2.4 children and settle down in a nice quiet house in the leafy suburbs. That’s what everyone else does. I didn’t want to be everyone else. I wanted to be that guy your mama warned you about.

Plus, what’s the point of being old and rich? You don’t wanna be that creepy old guy making it rain at the strip club when he can’t get it up, or dive off the Great Barrier Reef when you’ve barely got enough lungs to make it up the stairs. Before you know it, you’ll be on your deathbed, wondering how life passed you by. Better make hay while the sun shines.

But I was too much of a pussy to rob anyone and, besides, I’d feel bad about it afterwards. So I started selling pirate DVDs, a racket that earned me a couple of extra pounds until everyone discovered the Internet. That’s when I settled on drugs.

2

A Brief History of Molly

We were all gathered in the woods. It was 14 February 2009. Valentine’s Day. I’ve never had a good Valentine’s Day. Three at night and it’s going full swing. Trance music echoed through the trees and giant sheets with psychedelic patterns hung off the branches with trippy designs that seemed to move along with the beats. A few unsavoury characters stood around muttering ‘hash, pills, MDMA’ to all the girls in fluorescent body paint and the dreadlocked Italians in tank tops who went past. A few people pitched tents or sat around bonfires, the flickering flames radiating through the shadows of the forest.

Given that I’d spent a few hours sitting by the bonfire I started to smell like a chimney sweep, but it had been a profitable evening and I had a couple hundred quid in my pocket. I was selling my wares, minding my own business, when three guys in hoodies came up and asked to look at the goods.

‘Sure, it’s thirty-five on the g or twenty for half.’

‘Why don’t you just give it to us?’

‘What?’

‘Blud, if I wanted to rob you, I would have done it already,’ said the tallest one, trying to lure me into a false sense of confidence.

‘You must be having a laugh,’ I said and pushed one of them out the way.

‘Oi, why you makin’ moves on my friend like that!’

Something hit me hard on the side of the head, then all three jumped me, repeatedly kicking me and stamping on my face. Sparks flew round my head like a cartoon as I felt the warm, metallic taste of blood gently filling my mouth.

‘Hey, he’s got a blade!’ one of them said, and pulled out a Rambo knife from my jacket; ironically, the very one I’d brought to defend myself.

Oh shit, I thought, please don’t kill me.

He stuck me six times: three times in the left leg, twice in the arm and once (lightly) in the side. They weren’t trying to finish me off, only to make sure I wouldn’t get back up again (although I’m well aware that if they’d hit my femoral artery it would have been a different story). They took all my Molly and cash but I managed to cling on to my gold chain and phone.

It’s funny now, but at the time I hadn’t even realised I’d been stabbed and went back to the party. The sensation of being stabbed isn’t as painful as you might think. First of all, your adrenalin’s going, and that can take a man through a lot. Second, when the knife went into my leg it severed my nerves, so I could literally feel no pain. My leg felt a bit funny and numb, but I thought that was just cos I fell over in a weird way when they were kicking me. I felt a bit cold as well, but I didn’t realise it was from massive blood loss; just thought … you know … it was night-time, so it was cold. I only clocked what had happened after the sun came up and it was time to go home.

As we were making our way back to the train station, I heard an icky sound coming from my shoe … squish, squish, squish. I looked down and saw that the whole left side of my body was red and that blood had poured all the way down my leg, filling the shoe to the brim. I must have spent the previous three to four hours blissfully unaware I was bleeding all over the place. That’s when I realised I should probably go to hospital. But for some reason I decided to call a taxi, which ended up costing me £5, when I really should have called an ambulance, which would have been free. When I got to the hospital, the nurse was amazed I was still conscious after losing such copious amounts of blood.

The first coke I ever sold, I bought one gram off a grubby crackhead on the street and mixed it with some crushed-up paracetamol to make it into two (note to aspiring drug dealers: do not do this – everyone will hate you). Realising this was a sure-fire way to get my ass kicked, I soon switched to selling drugs the ‘legit’ way; by going to raves and shotting MDMA.

I’d walk around, offering baggies of foul-tasting powders and aromatic greenery. The mark-up was huge: I’d buy an ounce (around 28 grams) for about £300 and split it into grams and half-grams, which went for £35 to £40. There was a rave every weekend and for a few hours walking round the party I could easily quadruple my investment. Drugs are an easy, low-risk source of tax-free profit. You can scream how it’s wrong all you want, but name another business where you can quadruple your investment over a weekend. Go on, name one.

Molly (MDMA, 3,4-Methylenedioxymethamphetamine) was originally synthesised by German scientists looking for a weight-loss drug in the 1910s, but it wasn’t till the 1960s that it came to the attention of one Alexander Shulgin, who realised they’d found something special.

Alexander Shulgin, or Sasha to his friends, was a crazy-haired, mad scientist who carried out experiments in the shed at the back of his garden in San Francisco, usually on himself, like a psychedelic Doc Brown, Soon after he put that foul-tasting powder in his mouth, Sasha was in for a wild ride. Molly gets your heart racing, makes you wanna dance, and floods your brain with serotonin and dopamine, filling you with happiness and euphoria. It’s called the Love Drug because you feel such empathy and compassion for everyone around you, even complete strangers; it makes you wanna touch and hold them. On the flipside, ecstasy makes your penis shrivel up like an old carrot, so any relationships you enter into as a result will be strictly platonic (the scientific name for this is ‘pilly willy’). It also makes you grind your teeth and burst into a silly gurn. Shulgin started sharing the love with his circle of friends, some of whom were psychiatrists, who used it to help their patients open up.

A little while after Shulgin’s discoveries, house music was taking off in Chicago and Detroit’s gay and black communities, before making its way to dance capitals Goa and Ibiza. People realised the only way to make this shit sound good was by taking heavy doses of mind-altering chemicals. Word got round the dance scene from Shulgin’s psychiatrist mates and, before long, DJs were playing sets of trance music before crowds of loved-up party animals. The rave was born.

The first time I did MDMA is a night I’ll never forget. Everyone kept banging on about how they were doing Molly and I figured that, if I was selling it, I might as well see what the fuss was about. So I went into the toilets, laid out a card over the box of toilet roll, and poured out half a gram (I didn’t know how much you’re supposed to take), then racked it all up into a line and snorted it (I didn’t know you’re not supposed to do that either) … Fuck!!!! The pain shot right up to my eyes. I stumbled out the cubicle and stared at myself in the mirror, looking like I’d just been pepper-sprayed at a football match. After about half an hour of standing by the tap and drinking water to wash the foul taste from my throat, I went back to the bar and ordered another beer. That’s when it kicked in.

And oh my God … holy shit, there’s a reason they call it ecstasy. Time slowed down and I felt this wave of joy come over me, like nothing was wrong with the world and I just felt love; love for myself and my fellow man … love for our species! The surface of the bar felt silky smooth rather than the grubby wooden board with spilled pints it was in reality. A girl from my school came up to me, and I had no idea what she said but it was great. When I went outside, it felt like I was gently floating, not walking, over the ground, and I floated all the way to my mate’s club, where there was a private party, but he let me in and I started wandering around, shaking hands and saying hi to everyone while they were all, like, ‘Who the fuck is that guy??’ After fifteen minutes I went back outside and called everyone in my phonebook, chatting shit about what I thought was life, the universe and everything, but really I was off my nut, so who knows. I just felt so close to everyone around me, like they were all my friends and would happily listen to me talking twaddle for hours. But by now it was getting late, so I walked/floated all the way home, where, still buzzing, I went on Facebook and stayed up listening to the same five songs I had downloaded off LimeWire.

Raves had problems, sure – noise, litter – but for the most part it was just kids waving glowsticks and having a good time. But as the rave scene grew in the eighties and nineties, so did the tabloids’ panic. MDMA was already banned because its ingredients fell under the Misuse of Drugs Act, but now you had a bunch of teenagers in a field, doing god-knows-what, while the breweries weren’t making any money. Most of the world’s ecstasy is made in clandestine labs in the Netherlands, using ingredients sourced from unscrupulous chemical plants in China. The turning point came during the weeklong rave in Castlernorton in 1992. The police didn’t have enough manpower to arrest everyone, pictures went round of them looking like plonkers and this was followed shortly by the 1994 Criminal Justice Act, which gave police authority to shut down parties characterised by ‘repetitive beats’ (thus distinguishing them from those other parties, where everyone sat around gurning their teeth to Pavarotti). Now of course EDM’s become part of mainstream clubbing, leaving behind the drug culture for good, clean, wholesome booze.

But the scene didn’t die. Once I found this rave on Facebook – the Gathering of Celestial Souls or something like that. The way it’s usually organised is you only get the address by ringing a number on the night – that way, by the time the Feds have managed to clock on, the party is well underway and they don’t have the resources or manpower to stop it. This time though some idiot posted the address on Facebook and by the time we got there it was shut down, with cop cars surrounding the warehouse. There was now a crowd forming of two hundred or so disappointed partygoers with nowhere to go, and someone suggested a nearby park. After some negotiations with local bus drivers we all managed to find the place, only to find Old Bill had beaten us yet again. This time though there were only two squad cars with an officer each and a ‘POLICE LINE: DO NOT CROSS’ tape sealing off the park. They were outnumbered a hundred-to-one, so we figured if we all just rushed them there was nothing they could do. So we all turned to face the coppers and started counting down. I got ready. ‘FIVE … FOUR … THREE … TWO … ONE!

I jumped the barricades and sprinted down the road to the park. As I was running I could hear my footsteps … only my footsteps. I looked back and a horrible feeling hit me: I was the only one running. Everyone else was just standing there behind the checkpoint laughing their asses off while the two plodders looked on with a mixture of contempt and disbelief. I couldn’t exactly turn back as in my jacket pocket I had a dozen or so wraps of some sticky Mary Jane ready for sale, so I had no choice but to keep on going, narrowly dodging another patrol car which arrived as backup. I ran through the park and into some bushes through to a narrow country lane and some fields and managed to run all the way out of town, eventually making my way back to civilisation by getting on the M4, By then someone had turned up their car stereo to the max and there was a full-fledged improvised street party going on, so I started shifting my gear. This went on for about an hour or two until the three Feds who remained at the scene called in the cavalry and about four vans full of goons showed up, all spoiling for a fight. Knowing it was time to make a quick exit, I started quickly walking away along with the rest of the crowd. The five-o however had other ideas, and I could hear voices and whistles behind me. Time to pick up the pace, I thought. My power-walk burst into a run.

‘Stop!’ I heard them shout, ‘you’re not gonna get away!’

But I still had a fair bit of green so I kept running, throwing my stash into some bushes as I went along but leaving one baggy as a sacrifice to give them a reason why I was running. Adrenalin gave me wings and I jumped a brick wall like it was nothing, and would have got away from those fat bastards too if it wasn’t for one of their vans going round the corner. I hit the windshield on the way down and rolled onto the street. Six Feds jumped into the street and hauled me into the van where a certain policeman started going through my phone in an attempt to prove I was a ‘filthy little drug dealer’ (I was, but that’s beside the point). I’m not 100 per cent certain in the five minutes we’d been acquainted he had time to go through formal procedure and get a warrant signed by a judge, so I can only assume that the policeman was one of those loose cannons, always getting in trouble with his superiors for refusing to play things by the book.

Fortunately since they had no real evidence on me apart from that one little baggy they had to let me go with a caution, after which I promptly went back to the bushes and picked up what was left of my stash.

When you’re a dealer, you tend to gravitate naturally towards other dealers: your people introduce you to their people, and so on. Through some mutual acquaintances I met Shaa, a fresh-off-the-boat Sri Lankan refugee. He was surprisingly chill considering the crazy life he’d had. Fleeing the Tamil Tigers and civil war in his homeland, Shaa ended up on the south coast with a student visa, where he started rolling with a local crew selling weed. Things went haywire and there was a dispute about money, which led to one of them shooting him point-blank in the chest.

Shaa overstayed his visa but before he left (voluntarily, you racists), he introduced me to a higher tier of business, and the wholesale market – buying in nine-bars and kilos and breaking them up into ounces so you can sell them in bulk. Granted, I was still learning the ropes then and not very streetwise, so I fucked up by giving shit on credit to people I was never gonna hear back from. Rookie. Well, you live you learn.

Anyway, I was growing tired of this small-town shit. Nothing ever happens in Bath, and every time you’d leave the house you’d see someone you knew. It was time for me to move on to bigger things.

3

LDN

My parents had to coax me into applying for uni. Originally, I wanted to join the army, learn how to blow shit up, but my vision at the time was −6 in one eye and −6½ in the other, which isn’t the best selling point for a role with high-calibre weaponry. When it came to a degree, my first choice was actually film studies, but mother insisted I enrol in a ‘real’ course, because apparently the ability to quote Sean Connery lines on a whim (‘ejectah sheat, you musht be joking!’), while impressive, is not highly prized by employers. So I went with history, since my train of thought literally was: I’ve seen Braveheart, so maybe I already know what happens.

I got into Queen Mary University of London, which was in the East End. Unlike Bath, Whitechapel was the perfect embodiment of a multicultural melting pot. A hundred years ago it had a reputation for being a squalid shithole, home to Russian and Polish Jews fleeing persecution in their motherland and Jack the Ripper, practising amateur surgery on some unlucky prostitutes. Eventually, the Jews made their money and left and the Bengalis moved in, turning Brick Lane synagogue into a mosque and the bagel shops into curry houses.

You wouldn’t have thought it, but in the 1980s, Shoreditch was a proper white, working-class area and a stronghold of the neo-Nazi National Front. All the skinheads gathered there to launch attacks on Brick Lane. That’s why the Asian gangs formed, to protect the community from these racist attacks. Since then, Brick Lane’s been taken over by hipster pussies, so the one-time vigilantes have taken to brawling among themselves: the Bethnal Green boys hate the Brick Lane boys, and so on. On later pages we’ll embark on a globetrotting adventure, but for now let’s have a brief overview of the underworld back home.

The story of Brick Lane is in some ways the story of London. A hundred years ago, Britain owned half the world; now, half the world is coming to us.

A lifetime ago, hard geezers like the Krays and the Richardson Gang ruled the underworld. But the 1980s changed everything. Old-school villains, who earned their bread and butter through armed robberies and extortion, saw that with CCTV those days were numbered. The hippies were right: the future lay in drugs. So they sat back and reinvested their money in coke, dope and ganja, leaving the hands-on work to a new generation.

In the 1980s, Maggie Thatcher saved the British economy, but it came at a price: the rich–poor divide grew as the welfare state was scaled back, while single-parent families and other low-income groups were herded together on the estates, leading to a lot of wayward youngsters running around causing mischief.

Meanwhile, immigration was changing the face of London. Black people, mainly from Africa and the Caribbean, suffered the most out of the growing poverty of the 1980s, being confined to ghettos in Brixton, Peckham and Hackney. The streets of South London in those days were ruled by the Yardies, career criminals from Jamaica. While in the UK they were seen as little more than a crew of ragtag crack dealers, back home, they were more akin to the Mafia.

In the 1980s, Jamaica was the mid-point for Colombian cocaine headed for Britain and Lester Lloyd Coke (yes, that was his real name) was the don of the Shower Posse, a gang who got their name because of how they sprayed their enemies with bullets. They were the enforcement arm of the Jamaican Labour Party (JLP), who used them to make sure voters ticked the right boxes on the ballot in their stronghold of Tivoli Gardens. In the 1960s, the JLP and its rival, the People’s National Party (PNP), divided Kingston into ‘garrison’ slums such as Tivoli, where they could rig the vote. In 1976, Bob Marley tried to mediate between the warring factions and got shot for his efforts. He tried again, bringing the JLP and PNP leaders together onstage at the One Love concert in 1978, but the 1980 general election was the bloodiest yet, with over eight hundred people killed.

Coke became so powerful he once chased a man into a police station, had him brought outside, then beat him to death in a fit of road rage. Later, he murdered five people (including a pregnant woman) in a rampage through a Miami crackhouse. However, in 1989 the JLP lost the election and Coke lost his protection. Indicted for the crackhouse massacre, he then mysteriously burnt alive in his cell just as he was about to be extradited. It couldn’t have happened to a nicer guy.

A big fuss was made about the Yardies setting off an explosion of gun crime, but the streets of Brixton never turned into the garrisons of Kingston. Still, with their Rasta heritage, the West Indians made easy targets for narcs looking to bump their arrest stats.¹

‘I find it quite interesting because around the seventies and eighties all the Yardies came in and they wanted that bad-boy gangster image,’ my friend Paddy later told me. ‘And, of course, that put a lot of fear into the local dealers cos people were turning up gutted in alleyways and all that. But now it’s come full circle: because of all that effort they put in to look like bad-boy gangsters, now the black boys get pulled over just for being black. It’s racial profiling because of what happened thirty years ago, so no one trusts them with drug stuff any more. It’s much easier to get away with crime now if you’re white.’

To someone who doesn’t experience it, stop-and-search might seem like a minor inconvenience. But if you have to live with it every day, it starts to colour your view of the police and your place in society. It’s unfair. Unfairness breeds suspicion, and suspicion breeds resentment.

In 1981, an officer in Brixton rushed to help a black boy who’d been stabbed. But no good deed goes unpunished and the bobby was quickly surrounded by a baying crowd convinced he’d attacked the boy. The rage against the police for the next two days left hundreds injured and property destroyed. A government inquiry into the Brixton riots found that the police’s unchecked use of beatings and stop-and-search wound the Afro-Caribbean community into an angry mob.

Thirty years later, the Metropolitan Police shot Mark Duggan, an alleged gang member, on his way to a showdown. There was a lot of suspicion that Duggan, while no angel, had been killed unlawfully. An angry protest outside Tottenham police station escalated into a riot that enveloped nearly every other borough in the city, and then the country: Bristol, Nottingham, Birmingham, Manchester, Liverpool. With so many crazy kids, the Feds were actually running scared, while a couple of enterprising crooks took advantage of the chaos to rob businesses. While everyone quickly blamed bands of rampaging youths for the riots, in which five people died, the focus on opportunistic looters distracted from the specifically anti-police anger that prompted the unrest.

While South London territory belonged to the Yardies, another immigrant crime wave swept behind the Turkish cafés and kebab shops of North London. For years, the flow of heroin into Europe was tightly controlled by a secret alliance known as the derin devlet, or Deep State. During the Cold War, NATO launched Operation Gladio, which would organise resistance should those blasted commies take over the continent. In Turkey, where political turmoil was already sweeping the country, Operation Gladio hired thugs to liquidate undesirables, which sometimes meant murdering left-wing students en masse. Over the next few decades, this unholy union brought together police, gangsters, military and intelligence officers and the Grey Wolves, a far-right paramilitary group that once tried to assassinate the Pope. The Deep State mounted coups whenever they felt that the government was getting too Islamist or left-wing. This would have all remained under wraps were it not for a rather inconvenient car crash in the town of Susurluk in 1996, in which a police chief, a drug-dealing hitman for the Grey Wolves, the killer’s girlfriend and a Kurdish warlord were pulled from the wreckage.

Since then, there haven’t been more awkward car wrecks to give us further titillating insights into Turkey’s puppet-masters, and since coming to power President Erdoğan has been obsessively purging the military of anyone who might dethrone him. However, while the original Turkish Mafia in London was mainly Cypriot (like Jamaica, Cyprus was a British colony), newer gangs like the Bombacilar (‘Bombers’) and the Tottenham Boys descended from the rugged hills of southeastern Anatolia where, long suppressed by Ankara’s flag-waving nationalists, the Kurdistan Worker’s Party (or PKK) has been waging a bloody struggle for independence since the 1980s. The Deep State fought a dirty war against the PKK, its death squads ‘disappearing’ thousands of Kurdish activists (or any man old enough to hold a rifle).

The PKK’s struggle was allegedly funded by heroin. In the Turkish cafés and social clubs of Green Lanes, the Kurdish gangs acted as the militants’ local smack-distribution fronts. Of course, living in a multicultural melting pot by definition means people have to mix together: in a disturbing display of inter-ethnic unity, ever since the beef erupted between the Bombacilar and the Tottenham Boys, the two cliques began using black British gang members to subcontract one another’s murders.

From Turkey the heroin moves through the Balkans, which has always been a passageway from East to West. A few decades ago, the region was in chaos. Marshal Tito, Yugoslavia’s leader since the Second World War, had died, bringing nasty nationalistic differences to the fore, and sparking a three-way bloodbath between Serbs, Croats and Bosnians in 1991. Everyone in the Balkans hates each other, going back hundreds of years to Ottoman rule or depending on what side they fought on in WWII. In 1995, Serbian paramilitaries massacred 8,000 unarmed Bosnians at the town of Srebrenica.

To carry out ethnic cleansing, Serbian forces turned to militias like Arkan’s Tigers led by gang lord Željko ‘Arkan’ Ražnatović. Wanted by Interpol for an epic, decades-long crime spree across Europe, Arkan was assassinated in a Belgrade hotel lobby in 2000, but the Mafia still deeply penetrated the security services long after his death. In 2003, Prime Minister Zoran Đinđić was shot dead by a sniper while walking into the Serbian government headquarters after announcing a crackdown on organised crime. The assassination was orchestrated by members of the Serbian secret police, the JSO, who were worried he’d interrupt their cosy relationship with Belgrade’s coke-dealing Zemun clan.

Things weren’t looking so rosy in nearby Albania, either. For much of the twentieth century Albania was ruled by paranoid communist dictator Enver Hoxha, who dotted hundreds of thousands of bunkers across the countryside for fear of being invaded. While democracy arrived in the 1990s, it was still fragile, and in 1997 mass protests escalated into a full-on uprising after government officials were accused of running pyramid schemes. Many lost their life savings. Albania descended into anarchy as arms depots were looted, the weapons ending up in the hands of criminal gangs or the ethnic Albanian rebels who made up the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) in Yugoslavia.

Supposedly to prevent another Srebrenica, NATO launched a furious bombing campaign, allowing the KLA to win independence from Yugoslavia in the late 1990s before embarking on some ethnic cleansing of their own – this time against the Serbs. As well as from NATO’s devastating airpower, the KLA also got help from the Albanian godfathers running smack through Europe. The Kosovans were in a prime position to exploit this moneymaking opportunity since Yugoslavia lay right on the Balkan route, the main pathway by which heroin enters Europe from the Middle East. This wasn’t lost on the other side, either: Serbian ultranationalists, eager to ‘remove kebab’, also got in on the action. But the narco-business is about as international as it gets, and so amid all the ethnic strife in the Balkans it was kind of heart-warming to see the Serbs, Bosnians, Albanians and of course the Bulgarians² put aside their differences to keep pumping smack into Europe’s veins.

It’s the Albanians these days who are the en vogue Scary Foreign Gangsters™, making all the pussy-whipped gangsters that came before (Russians, Italians, Jamaicans) look like fucking ballerinas. In the 1990s, one infamous gangster, in a row over drug traffic to Italy, cut the head off one of his rivals and paraded it through his hometown, before blowing up the headless corpse with dynamite. You know how in horror films, you think the killer is dead but he comes back for one last scare? Ain’t none of that shit in Albania.

But that was Albania. In the 1990s. There’s little reason to think Albanian gangsters would want to draw attention to themselves in this way now, at least not any more than any other common-or-garden crims.

However, Albania is still a very poor country, a Third World in the middle of Europe whose economy depends on the ganja. The green-fingered inhabitants of one village, Lazarat, produced 4.5 billion euros’ worth of herb a year – over half of Albania’s GDP – defending their crop with mortars and Kalashnikovs.

Thousands of Albanians have fled to the UK as penniless immigrants or Kosovan refugees, and the papers are filled with how gangs with names like the ‘Hellbanianz’ are taking over Britain’s underworld. Bloody immigrants, coming here and taking jobs off hardworking British criminals! The truth is, it’s simplistic to think that if we didn’t take in these people, we wouldn’t have these problems, as if someone else wouldn’t just step up to fill the demand. Before the Albanians it was the Yardies, and before the Yardies, the Krays. So the problem might lie elsewhere than the immigrants.

Beyond the occasional brothel, most Russian crime in London is about big money changing hands and nerve-wracked spies sipping polonium tea. The only other racket I was involved with was cigarette smuggling. In the winter of 2011, I touched down in Kiev and took the metro to the main train station. Scattered around the station were several kiosks, selling everything from bread and magazines to vodka and, most importantly, fags. I came up to one and asked the nice lady in the booth: ‘A carton of Marlboro Lights,