My name is Dr. Adi Jaffe, and I'm an ex-meth-distributor who sold hundreds of pounds of meth, and this is how crime works. sleeping in bed with a
meth pipe next to you and a gun right to your right and with hundreds of thousands
of drugs in your closet is an insane end point. It's not normal. It was like my life got a hard reset. I mean, I had to go
right to the beginning. I started selling meth
because clients of mine wanted access to meth, and so I started out
buying very small amounts from street dealers
that I knew personally. So, an eight ball, which
is 3½ grams, at a time. The labs I saw in Southern
California were a joke compared to even the makeshift labs that Walter had in the
RV in "Breaking Bad." They were using pots and pans. They were using cups and glasses. It looked like a more typical
idea of a messy kitchen that you would see in somebody
who was addicted to meth than an actual lab. They rarely had glass beakers or flasks or anything of the sort. The easiest way to describe
the smell of a meth lab is an incredibly strong ammonia smell that will literally feel like it can burn the hairs inside of your nose, right? So you could tell the moment
you walked into a room where somebody was making meth. Sometimes you would cough right away if you didn't have a mask on you, or it would make your eyes water. Even the smaller labs really took care to put these small kind of hoods or fans right above their main reactions in order to port out the gases, and you'd have the cook and then the one or two
people who were helping him make sure that this was done. So, Airbnbs and short-term rentals are incredibly easy places
to set this stuff up, because really all you
need is a day or two of setup, manufacturing, and
breakdown, and you can leave. You wouldn't really leave much of a mark, as long as somebody had enough
time to air out the space and the smell wasn't there anymore. The other thing that is incredible about using things like Airbnbs is you get to move from place to place, which is then really hard to detect, because even if a neighbor
does notice that there's a pipe out of a window or
something like that, you know, if it's only there for a day
or two and then it leaves, nobody would know. All the labs that I saw were
locally here in Los Angeles for a very long time, but when
drug busts started happening in earnest in the late
'90s and early 2000s of drug labs everywhere
in Southern California, people started moving
them outside of the city, and they gradually moved closer and closer to some of the supply sources they had for some of the ingredients, right? And so it was well known
in farming communities for a while that you had to guard your nitrogen-rich fertilizer supplies because meth dealers and manufacturers would go and steal kilos and kilos, if not truckfuls' worth of the stuff, and then bring it back in order to be able to go manufacture their meth. The people that I knew that
manufactured had at least one, I'll call it a lab, but what it really was was either a van that was
hollowed out in the back or a full RV. The idea, in a way,
being that if you drive, then nobody can detect the fumes. The only thing that a lot
of them forgot was that when you're driving, nothing is stable. A handful of them actually
had to experience flare-ups, and one actual explosion that I know of. Everybody that I saw manufacturing meth was using the ephedrine method. And one of the first things
you have to do is you have to get the ephedrine out of
the Sudafed pills, right? And so then that ephedrine
is put progressively into additional chemical interactions. In the end, what you end up with is essentially a large pot, in most of these, of a clear liquid that
has the solvents in it, and then the next step is
really drying that product in order to get the end powder that is what everybody consumes. These were highly detailed,
very protected recipes that were guarded by this cook with the same sort of zeal you hear about Coca-Cola guarding their
original recipe, right? Because this was their leverage. The secrets were in
limiting people's knowledge about how to do what was
otherwise replicable. In a world of drug addiction and crime and sort of the underbelly of society, these cooks had standing. A Smurf was the name given essentially to a
meth-manufacturing runner. Most small-time dealers
that I knew would employ 10, 15, even 20 Smurfs. So they would go out to
the stores and buy the lye, they would go steal whatever it is that was required for the manufacturing, especially going to pharmacy
after pharmacy after pharmacy to secure individual packages of Sudafed. The idea of being able to go run around, get some ingredients,
work for a couple of days, and make $10,000 or $15,000
was highly attractive. And so everybody was always trying to get their hand on a good recipe. There's absolutely a connection between the method of cooking the meth itself, the impurities that exist in it after, and actually the quality
of the meth itself. So, when I was starting out in the "meth game" in the late 1990s, there was this lore about
P2P meth at the time. That was the stuff everybody wanted. That meth had a blue tint to it, so everybody was always
looking for blue meth, which was what was so
ironic about "Breaking Bad" when they started introducing
this story of blue meth supposedly created by Walter. That was what I knew as
the best meth you could get from the stories of my dealing days. The demand among my customers grew. My dealer couldn't
really supply me anymore, so what ended up happening is we would go on together on deals. And we ended up going
together to meet his dealer, a woman named [beep]
who lived in downtown LA in a massive warehouse
with about 12 other people. At the time, a pound went
for about $10,000 or so, so they were pretty expensive pounds. I would come in to buy as
much product as I could. I would leave there with
a pound, pound and a half if they had really done a
great job of manufacturing, and so they would be left
with about $15,000 from me. There was a hierarchy. [Beep] always got paid in
money, and it was always cash. Once [beep] got paid, you
could tell that there were a couple of other people
who actually got money, and the rest of the
people literally relied on free meth supplies to do the work. The labs that I knew didn't get robbed. The drugs came in quickly,
and they left quickly, because there was the
need to distribute them in the moment that they were made. What did happen much more
often was when drug dealers would actually get robbed, so after the drugs would get delivered. Because they're going to
have a supply on them. So the risk of being robbed actually happened much more often. Obviously, the dark web
is a huge part of this, to make it so much more
difficult to identify, track, let alone apprehend
and stop at the source any of this manufacturing or distribution. The supply was really, really unreliable. And what that would mean is one month, there would be all the meth I
wanted, and then other times, it would either be
incredibly dirty and impure or they just wouldn't have any. Back in the day when they were making this with ephedrine pills,
when they were starting to crack down on ephedrine pills in the US, as restrictions started coming up about being able to buy eight-packs, and then four-packs, and then two-packs, eventually one pack of Sudafed at a time, which really choked the supply. And so like any good salesperson
trying to sell any product, legal or otherwise, I started
looking for other suppliers, and through a person who was
selling me cocaine at the time, I got introduced to another contact. So I had to drive down to Orange County to go to a strip club, and then somebody walks up to you, makes sure that you are who
you say you are, check your ID. He gives me an address, and he tells me to get back in my car. And eventually, we find
ourselves on a dirt road. This was my first meeting
with the actual cartel people, and it was the classic meeting you've seen in every single movie in your life, which was, I got out with the money, they got out on the other side, but they had three guys, obviously with weapons on them. And we walked into the middle,
I gave them the bag of money, they gave me the bag of drugs. One of the big things about dealing with the cartels directly is
they were really reliable. Every single time that I contacted them letting them know that I needed product, it wasn't a problem. I
never needed another one, 'cause they could always
supply what I needed. At this point, over 90%
of the methamphetamine sold and used in the United States has been manufactured
in Mexican superlabs. I believe that given the
incredible proliferation of these superlabs south of the border, it's become almost redundant
to have local labs. The manufacturing is
easier, it's more reliable, the product is cheaper at scale. They can absolutely employ real talent, so they can hire real chemists and people who really know what
to do at the higher levels. But as you go downstream, they're offering sometimes
pretty well-paying jobs, given what else is available
in the surroundings. You need a lot more money in the US to buy your way out of
law-enforcement regulation. We all know it's doable, it's
just a lot more expensive. In Mexico, it's much, much cheaper to buy enough police
power in your pockets. So, these meth superlabs, they're relative superlabs, right? They're making thousands
or maybe tens of thousands of pounds a year. So, there's been a huge
shift back to P2P meth in the United States and in Mexico. P2P meth actually ends up being stronger than ephedrine-based meth,
creating massive problems -- mental-health issues, larger incidents of things like psychosis
from meth, et cetera -- and that's creating a bigger crisis around meth use right now than
we've seen in a long time. The honest answer as to
why I stopped selling drugs is I didn't see a way
where I could keep doing it and still live a life
that was outside of gates. Everybody that I knew who sold drugs ended up either dead or
in prison at some point. I never saw anybody get
out of that world intact. I got in my motorcycle accident in 2001, and I got found with, it was cocaine, but I got found with a half
a pound of cocaine on me, and police knew that somebody
with a half a pound of cocaine in their jacket knows somebody
who sells drugs to quantity. They obviously searched
the entire place, right? And started looking through the walls, looking through the ducts, the AC ducts, and they found toxic chemicals, 'cause one of my friends
who was manufacturing meth actually left some of the
chemicals at my house. I had a lockpick kit, and
that was illegal to carry. I had a gun that was loaded by my bed. And you get a violation for
every single substance you have. And I actually, even on top of that, picked up two charges
for the manufacturing of methamphetamine and
MDMA. We had a pill press at my place where we
were pressing MDMA pills. So initially, I was looking
at about 15 to 18 years, and my lawyer immediately
that day told me one thing: "It's clear you're
addicted to these drugs. Everybody can see it on you. If this judge doesn't
see that you're serious about changing the direction
your life is going in, you're going to get the full thing. You're going to get 15
to 18 years in prison." I think that was the only way to sell me on treatment, honestly, at the time. And so, I listened to the
judge, and I went to a rehab in Pasadena here in Southern California. So we did something called an open plea, which actually meant I had to plead guilty to all nine felonies, but if I pled guilty to the nine felonies that were still on my record, the judge could make whatever decision he felt like was right,
given my situation. And he came out, and he gave
me this very creative sentence, in my opinion. And the sentence was 364 days, one day less than a year. "If when you get out you
start selling drugs again or I see you here again,
whatever you do next is going to have seven years added to it." And in a way, it felt, there
was this biblical story about a king with a sword
sort of hanging over his head, just right above his
head, and it felt like I had this hanging sword that actually was kind of my guardian for a couple of years while
I was trying to figure out how to get my life on track. I just want to say publicly, I also recognize mass
privilege in who I am, right? And so, I may be from the Middle East and I may be actually a
first-generation immigrant to the United States, but nobody
can tell that when I speak. So standing in front of that court, I was a relatively young adult white male, and so I think there was a
lot of privilege afforded me by that reality in that moment as well. When I got out of jail,
I tried to get a job. I couldn't get hired for anything. I tried for mall jobs, I tried to become a pizza-delivery man, and I couldn't get hired. The only next thing I had available other than a job was to go back to school, so I got to get into Cal State Long Beach, which was the first place
I got my masters in. Then I went back to UCLA to get my Ph.D., where I ended up teaching. And so I ended up taking this route that seems blessed at the end of the road, but it was in no way,
shape, or form guaranteed, and there were many, many times along the way that the idea of going
back and having that access to money and power was
really, really charming. The million-dollar question is how to stop meth production
and meth use from occurring. The problem is that the
government has been known to try to use prohibition
and interdiction, right? Ways that stop the supply
or make it illegal to use. When it comes to every drug,
including methamphetamine, what we've seen over and over is that these methods don't work, and so they became this
very deeply ingrained public campaign to make kids,
young adults, et cetera, aware of the meth problem. So you would see the
faces of meth pictures, and what meth does to you,
and all that kind of stuff. That's when we started seeing the opioid problem
explode in this country, and it was as if we
looked in one direction, and then all of a sudden a
Whac-A-Mole game occurred, and everybody had to turn their attention to opioids for a while. But in the interim, while
everybody was focusing on opioids, the supply and demand for
meth started increasing again and again and again.
And over the last decade, we've seen a massive
resurgence, once again, in the use of methamphetamine. They are going to meet the need, they're going to meet the
supply that is required, and they're going to
find any way to do it. I think that focusing on ways to stop the supply of chemicals
is just the wrong approach, and it's not something we
need to think too hard about. And the real game is to ask
ourselves a question of, why is methamphetamine use going up? About 85% of the incarcerated population in the United States either have an active
drug-addiction problem or were arrested for drug crimes. Add to the cost of interdiction,
prohibition, et cetera, which is in the trillions of dollars, add to that the cost of lives, and on top of that, the
cost of incarceration that we don't consider
part of the war on drugs because it's actually part of our overall crime-fighting measures. When you add all of those
statistics together, I think it's pretty safe to
say that the war on drugs can be considered one of
the most dismal failures of the law-enforcement community
here in the United States. 10% of the population in the
US struggles with addiction as diagnosed by the DSM. Even that number has gone
up. So, the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services
Administration, SAMHSA, has just raised its own estimate of the people who struggle
with addiction in the US from 24 [million] to about 40 million. So this is a problem
that affects all of us, and yet somehow we've
bought into the narrative that "those people" are
addicts and alcoholics. But we're here, we're
normal, and we're safe. Addiction, as we all know, does not discriminate based
on socioeconomic status. And we need to get it out of our heads that the people who
struggle are other than us, because they are all of us. And so the war on drugs has
been a war on those people, and that is us. I was selling to my friends
when it started out, so the idea of having to be secretive, A, didn't dawn on me, and B,
was relatively impossible, 'cause they all knew me.
I was a student at UCLA. They were all my friends.
They lived around me. Everybody in the drug
game goes by monikers, so I would meet people like
Bullet and Murdera and Termite, just, you come up with a name, and that becomes kind of the moniker that you go by when you're selling. I used to drive, when I
started out, I would drive 250 or 300 miles a day in
Los Angeles delivering. But really the moment I moved out of that, everybody came to me, and
everybody was screened. And so even though it
was never my intention to end up being a guy with a gun walking into a cartel
deal outside of San Diego, there were these incremental
small progressions that got me there. And
what it taught me is that if I put my attention and my
efforts on the right things and I just give it enough time, five, six, seven, eight years, just like my drug-dealing career grew, I could actually achieve some
pretty incredible things, but now, doing them on the right side. I was really scared of telling
people that I'd been to jail, that I used to be a drug dealer, that I used to be addicted to meth. It felt big. And so
some of my friends knew, my really, really close friends. But what I did instead is, this is 2008. I started blogging about it, and I started speaking publicly, but to people I didn't know, right? Blogging is kind of safe.
It's people out there. I then ended up running
groups and seeing clients in a treatment center here
locally in Los Angeles. Eventually, I opened up
my own treatment center, and I've pretty much dedicated my life now to helping people with addiction problems. And so, in Igntd, which is what I do now, which is an online
addiction-help platform, I've also written a book
called "The Abstinence Myth," relying on the fact that you
don't have to be ready to quit in order to get your life in order. If you're ready to do something, you should start acting now, even if you're not ready to quit. This is my life's purpose,
this is what I do now, and I'm incredibly motivated and grateful and humbled that I get
to help people every day. My name is David McMillan. I've smuggled over $17 million worth of heroin internationally. And this is how crime works. The heroin world is very
dark and full of secrets. Involves hundreds of thousands of people, mostly down at a very low level. And you're passing by heroin traffickers without even thinking about it. I was a smuggler for over 35 years. Been arrested around about 12 times. The three main producers
around the world of heroin have become Mexico, mostly to serve the market in the United States. In South Asia, it's Vietnam and Laos, the remnants of the old Golden Triangle. And, of course, Afghanistan, which tops all of them in sheer volume. And that comes from different provinces which over the years have
had sometimes droughts and sometimes interference. The Taliban actually stopped almost all of the heroin production. But they changed their mind
when they saw the money. One of my first trips to
Afghanistan was back in '79. When finding and making a
reliable contact for heroin, it's best not relied upon
through introduction. Because the person who's introduced you, he could be an agent for the DEA. So it's better to go from the ground up. And that might mean going
out to the farmlands, meeting the farmers. I've traveled out into the
heartlands of Afghanistan and lived with the farmers for a few days, perhaps a week. Got involved in something
local. Helped with a well. Come to know something about their lives. And they make their own judgments. People in the village
would come to trust me because I wasn't in a hurry. You don't need an awful lot of opium to do quite well if you're a farmer. They get at least $50 a kilo. Now, for a farmer, that's quite good. The opium poppy has a
big bulb underneath it, and that's about the size of a golf ball. The farmers, when it's mature, scrape the sides of it, and overnight, little beads of white sap are produced. That's scraped off to form
a kind of sticky brick. Now, that is the opium base. That contains a very, very
high yield of morphine, 15%, 20% sometimes. Beyond the farmers, every part of the heroin cultivation, processing, and handling
is done separately. None of the people connected
with the supply side are really connected in any group way that you might expect with crime. They are simple people in the countryside. You would buy perhaps, say,
10 kilos of opium base. We'll call them chemists, but they're really just,
like, skilled artisans who would take that and do the processing. Now, don't imagine some
fancy laboratory or anything when it comes to that. You'll see a couple of old tin pots, five or six plastic buckets, some cloth for filtering,
some drums of chemicals. Oh, and maybe an old
branch for stirring things. The opium base is mixed with ammonia, then washed out
to extract that morphine, dried out into kind of a black gunk, and then it is cooked
with acetic anhydride. It smells like a really
incredibly strong vinegar. The rest is cleanup, because it first comes out
of that completely brown. There are really only two
types, white and brown. The brown is the half-processed and only half-as-strong version. The white has been purified, cleaned. The brown is smoked, whereas the white has traditionally been injected or snorted. But there's been almost no white heroin sold around Europe for years. And people who inject have
been injecting brown heroin. A dangerous thing to do, and a corrosive thing to do on
their own arteries and veins. The police agencies have their own way of determining the purity of heroin. There really is no better
test than experience, and I can tell within
seconds from the smell, the texture, and the taste of heroin where it came from and very
close to how strong it is. I would first have to get
it out of Afghanistan -- it's a landlocked country -- and shipped through to Pakistan. That had its own complications
across the border, because any kind of commerce there, whether it's smuggling or not, involves a certain amount of lubrication of the border area. Bribery. Everything has a price, whether it's refrigerators
or television sets. The smuggling of heroin is limited by the fact that it
can't really be disguised into looking like something else. It can be packed flat into
many different objects. In fact, books were often used. The hardback covers, front and back. I suppose I'd have to
look back upon my time smuggling out of Thailand as
the most successful operation. The quality was right. It was the big bags that
come from the Golden Triangle where they're in plastic,
and they're stamped with the brand name of the local warlord or chieftain who guarantees safe passage. I would press it down and conceal it within the wooden surrounds
of radio amplifiers or a piece of electrical equipment in your in-hold baggage without
it being interfered with. I would make it pressed within the sides of the wood and veneered around the outside. Almost all of the heroin
that's transported by air very rarely goes above half-kilo slabs that get concealed in
luggage or body-packed or even made into the
handles of suitcases. I used to carry it around
by myself, you know. But at least I knew if I did it myself, I'd be in control of my own destiny. But I relented. I found couriers. Couriers were chosen by their look -- that had to pass the first test -- their stability and reliability, and also their ability to
keep quiet after the event. And that was very important. I had one guy that was a kind of recruiter
for me down in Pattaya, and another one in London. My recruiter in London had been kicked out of Southeast Asia. Ended
up at a hostel here that the government used
to try and resettle people who'd been kicked out of other countries. It was a gold mine of couriers. Somebody who's not relaxed and operating out of their own volition makes a very poor courier. I don't think people always have completely selfish motives. People who have families to support sometimes consider it. Poverty might make that final little push. To pass through airport security, it was important to know the
airport systems very well. I would spend quite a bit of time traveling through those airports, knowing what kind of
X-ray machines they used, what the staff were trained to do, whether shoes had to come off or not, how sensitive the metal detectors were. As years went on, customs teams would be trained particularly well in detecting certain kinds of things. They have some for cigarettes.
They have some for drugs. They would move those teams around at different times of the day. It was important to know
when that team was on. I would use multiple passports in ensuring the safety of the couriers, so that when they left a source country, they would arrive in Europe and be able to take out of
their pocket another passport which showed only travel in Europe. And they would have tickets to match. I got birth certificates for people who had died either in infancy or very young, pre-traveling age and then built up the identity around that and get them legitimately issued. Arriving passengers were told to go to some arranged point, perhaps a hotel in town or a restaurant. I would watch them to see
if they'd had any problems, because it's always possible
that they'd been intercepted. Then they would be paid off immediately, and the bags would be taken away. Then it would be put
into storage for safety. I like to think of it sometimes as looking at one of those phone apps where it shows
you all of the flights in the world that are going on. You see thousands of them. And in a way, you can say that every one of those little
planes has got somebody, maybe four or five people on board who are carrying some amount of heroin. During my smuggling criminal career, I've been arrested around about 12 times, and it resulted in four convictions. The first one, that was
back in 1981 in Australia, resulted in a 10-year sentence. I'd been under an investigation
by Australian police, and I was running couriers at the time. My own lawyer had told
me to get out of town, but I stuck around. "No, I can deal with that. They'll never catch me with anything." I was sentenced to 15 years, of which I would ultimately serve 10. There's no lawyer in the trial. Anything can go. It seems everything's fair. I would say this: one of the reasons that I think the deterrent
sentences don't work often, the super-harsh treatment. My wife at the time, Clelia, was arrested; my business partner's
wife, Mary, was arrested; and they were put in the women's prison. They put an informer in with the girls in the women's prison to try and get some
information out of them. Unfortunately, little
Danielle was an arsonist. That's what she was in for. She set fire to the prison, and five women were killed, including Clelia and Mary. That was a ... oh, I don't have to say,
it was a major low point. I felt guilty, and so I should. The police had moved into
my house and trashed it. Every possession I had was
gone. My wife was dead. After that, next came my time in Thailand, where I was arrested on a drug case and escaped from there. That took two years' doing
to get out of that place. I found myself arrested in Pakistan, and that took almost two years, again, to get a not-guilty plea. From there, I found myself
arrested in Copenhagen, and then, lastly, a
little stretch in the UK. In my early 50s, around 2004, I walked away from the last deal. I'd been giving bits of advice
and being tipped for it, but even that was too close for comfort. I'd run out of time. I was getting simply too old. The price for this is jail time, and I'd promised family
not to use anymore. And also, based on
looking back and realizing that the reward was never enough. When it comes to the larger amounts, then it's all by shipping. I've known people to take
hundreds of kilos of heroin and pack them into oil drums or even in the pallets of
other goods that are going. So, a technique would
be to order some goods through an existing and reputable firm that had agents all around the world. Table lamps or even cab doors or cabinets, so that when it arrives back in the West that's being cleared as
their cargo, not yours. Sometimes, customs will intercept quite large shipments. People have asked me, "Would this make a dent in the market?" The supplies are built up at least three months in advance. So. Besides which, the intercepted cargo never amounts to the
total flow going through. So those seizures, though
they might make the news, a 10 lost here or even 5,000 kilos there won't substantially make any difference. The shipment routes for illegal and legal heroin never overlap. The approach is different, and the mechanism's entirely different. After a shipment comes
in, then it's unpacked, bagged up into whatever
form it's going out, whether it's in bulk in kilos or smaller amounts, ounces. It gets taken out to customers. Within a month, all would be gone. In the early days, it was so profitable. A kilo of heroin back in 1980, just personally, I could get back a
million dollars from that. And this was in Australia,
which has, of course, got inflated prices there. Expected purity was only at about 15%. So if I took it down to 18%, it would still be considered good. I used only dextrose to do this. But that still meant 1 kilo became 4. In the beginning, even put
in place a street network, because there were a couple
of streets in Melbourne which were notorious for it. Then come back to base
four or five times a night and reload, as it were. There's been some changes
between, say, 2002 and 2022. The retail price of heroin
has dropped considerably. It's now at about its most base level. Purity's not great, but price-wise, I can't imagine any factors that would make it any cheaper or
possibly take it up. Is it more available? It is, but there is no market
beyond a certain point. The popularity of heroin goes in waves of different fads and fashions. There's a solid core of
people who are fully addicted, and they don't change much. Street-level heroin is,
of course, not pure. It would be dangerous if it were. It's usually at about 15% to 20%, and that's considered strong. The cutting agents for brown heroin, usually mannitol. It's
really a baby laxative. In recent years, heroin's been cut with
a drug called fentanyl. It's a synthetic opioid, but it's a very dangerous drug. It's at least as strong as even heroin. So how would anybody measure it out? A tiny amount of fentanyl is often mixed with heroin to keep the strength up, but that can quite often be misjudged and end up with fatalities. But when there's a shortage or when somebody's simply greedy, the retailer can cut it again. And this can be potentially dangerous because it will seem weaker, and people will adjust to using weaker and they'll use more, so that when they get what
used to be the standard batch, it'll be quite a bit stronger, and there's a potential for overdose. But it has to be kept in mind, very few people die directly
from an overdose of heroin. It's usually when mixed with alcohol or sleeping pills. It almost never happens
when it's the heroin alone that finishes somebody off
or takes them over the top. There were political elements to opium and heroin manufacturing and distribution. Until 1911, heroin and
morphine were available from your local pharmacy or druggist, over the counter, just by asking for it. In fact, heroin was promoted
as a kind of cure-all. Little heroin pills were
made by Bayer in Germany. But after 1911, the Harrison Act was passed
in the United States, which turned attention to addictive drugs. When the Vietnam War took hold, heroin became something
the US troops tried during their downtime. They took those habits home with them. So we have a legacy from the Vietnam War. It's called a war on drugs,
but is it really a war? A war suggests that one side
has got hopes of winning. Drug traffickers and smugglers know that they won't win every
break, but then again, they don't have to win to be successful. They've just got to keep out
of jail most of the time. But still a high price to pay. From the authority's point of view, there would never be a situation where they could walk out and say, "Right, we've done our job.
There is no more smuggling." How can that possibly happen when the nature of business
is ongoing, rolling, and it replaces the fallen soldiers? The authorities could catch more smugglers by acting on their intelligence
or the tips they get, but they're kept by the amount of money, the resources they're given. In 40 years, I've only been taught one thing, that the only solution
is to legalize all drugs. Legalization would require, of course, some control measures so that somebody wouldn't be going into a shop and without any sensible reason
buying 10 kilos of heroin. On the other hand, to take
away that black market, the control has to be very light. And, of course, spend some
money on offering services for people who can't manage their drugs. Different countries offer different but generally all poor
alternatives to heroin and also not very effective
treatment programs. For example, in the United Kingdom,
there's virtually none. Somebody reporting or presenting
with a heroin addiction has to take a place on the list, and to get a substitute, has to wait several weeks. That will force them back into that world. It might reduce the harm. It'll save them some money because they've got a fallback position of, say, taking methadone
instead of using heroin. There are programs for harm reduction that are good, welcome,
and have some effect, such as needle-exchange programs or offer safe places to take drugs. Of course, that doesn't
get them off the drugs, but any of that assistance
is all a good thing. There's very little that can be done, because you are hoping to make a consistent, standard product that won't risk overdoses, yet won't be so rubbishy that people will move
on to unsafe supplies. But I don't see any way of doing that other than legalization. Also, in a world of legal drugs, there'd be fewer prison inmates on minor or any drug charges at all. And that would have the effect of allowing more police time to be
spent on violent crime and crimes that affect
people in a more direct way. To help source countries, we would have to do more than
simple crop substitution, which, so far, hasn't worked. It's not much better than
the deadly crop eradication, which has left a lot of farmers destitute. I was 18 years old when I first became involved in the drug trade and not much older when I began smuggling. I can never say in any way that I've ever been a victim of anything. I've walked headfirst. Even as a teenager, I was
up to some kind of mischief, selling bits of hash at school, whatever, from an early age. So when I met some safe crackers and they were retired from that, they were already a little bit in the local drug-distribution network with some local marijuana. But they didn't know
anything about importing. And it involved travel.
I'd get to see the world, and it seemed good for me. And I went out and did it on purpose. Something we don't
realize when we're young is that a regular human
life is a short one. And you haven't got so many years. Only looking back on
the smuggling business, the drug trade, from an
older man's perspective, how plain and clear it is that it is not just the danger, but it is the pointlessness and the futility of the undertaking. Since I've been out of the smuggling game, these days, I put up CCTV cameras, which involves a certain amount of trust. I've also written a couple of books, one that seemed to take years because it was involving
that most complex world in Afghanistan and Pakistan and the troubles there and
the involvement of the DEA. That took about 10 years to write. That's "Unforgiving Destiny." Of course, I regret kind of everything about the life I walked into. People ask me why I didn't
walk away from that world after my first major arrest. And the answer is that I
couldn't imagine a world where I wasn't running around underground. It didn't seem to me at the
time there was any real choice. My name is Pieter Tritton, aka Posh Pete. I smuggled over 5 million pounds' worth of cocaine internationally. This is how crime works. I've been in prison with people there, capos from the Sinaloa cartel, bosses from the Colombian cartels. And even when they were in
their heyday, making millions, the amount of fear and paranoia that they had to contend with, people trying to kill them, people trying to take
their business from them. And then the end, what
did they end up with? They ended up going to
prison for a long time and losing all of it, pretty much. I am extremely lucky to be alive. In my opinion, the risk
is not worth the reward. Cocaine is farmed in, well, farmed and produced in Peru, Bolivia, and Colombia. The farms will generally
be in rural locations out in the countryside. The farmers themselves
are paid quite poorly. They have to farm an acre of bushes for 1 kilo of cocaine. Once the cocaine is processed, I know in Peru you can
buy it for as little as, should we say, $700 up
to $1,200 for a kilo. We had to basically make a fake company, a fake profile, have a number in order to be able to go to
these big chemical companies to then buy the chemicals from them. Because they wouldn't sell to
just anyone from the public. You had to be from a business. Ether is one that's
very highly controlled. Acetone as well, in South America. Ether is the big one,
because the ether washes, it used to be the best type
of wash to make cocaine. Sourcing tanker-loads of
ethers produced the cocaine. It's virtually impossible there now, so they're having to use other chemicals, which aren't quite as good. And that's one reason cocaine, if anyone out there has been
doing cocaine for a long time, they will now be able to tell
that the cocaine these days is not the same as cocaine 20 years ago. Because I've been around cocaine so much, I can, without even taking it, I can just rub it between my fingers, look at the color, smell it, and I can tell you pretty
much which country it's from by the chemicals that
have been used in it. My most successful method of smuggling was a form of impregnating
the cocaine into rubber. Through a Colombian connection, someone in Cali would buy the cocaine. They would then give it to, like, a basic chemist over there. So the cocaine would be put into liquid, and then into liquid latex, which would then be set in
sheets, very thin sheets. We would then put those latex sheets into the ground sheets of tents. So we would employ passengers, basically, to go and collect the tent after it had been
impregnated with the cocaine to then bring that back through customs. I kind of set some ground rules when it came to recruiting passengers. I would try and find
people that had, obviously, no criminal record, or fairly collected, you know, reasonably well presented. And just people that were fairly sensible, preferably someone that
was working already. And then we would pay them
between 10,000 and 12,000 pounds on their return to Britain once the drugs had been extracted. Or sometimes, if it was enough
funds, enough cash available, we'd pay them as soon as
they came off the plane and handed the tent over. First tent that we brought in, I flew to Quito in Ecuador. The tents had already been manufactured and the cocaine impregnated into it. I'd managed to get through unscathed, got back to Britain, landed, it's done. Fully expecting to be
stopped by the police there. So, yeah, I mean, I arrived
and just collected the tent and walked straight
through, and that was it. I mean, I was, to be honest, I was in shock that nothing happened. There was nearly 5 kilos
of cocaine in that. And having gone through that experience, I realized that this
method that we were using, of impregnating the cocaine into rubber, was definitely a good method. Because it, you know, I'd
just been stopped by customs and got through three customs checks — one in Ecuador, one in
Holland, and one in Britain — and come through with it fine. During the time that we were trafficking, we never actually lost a single shipment. The great thing about that method was that it wasn't detectable by X-ray. You can't detect it by a scanner. The dogs couldn't detect it, because obviously the cocaine
has been changed into rubber. I mean, that pretty much
nullifies all the checks that they can do on you. But there were definitely countries that we avoided going
through or trafficking in. A lot of the South Americans
that I've spoken to try to avoid trafficking in America. The DEA have got powers to come down to Colombia or Ecuador,
wherever, basically, and arrest you and then
take you back to the States and try you there. Places like Thailand, Indonesia, where they have the death
sentence, always big no-nos. Saudi Arabia, anywhere that's got the death sentence for drugs. Also countries with really harsh laws, high sentences. As far as other forms
of smuggling cocaine, obviously the cartels use
containers, shipping containers, to bring in the largest
shipments of cocaine. Tons at a time. This is normally done using corrupt port officials at both ends who facilitate the
movement of the cocaine. I didn't like the idea, personally, because I'd realized, having seen other people do it, and when it went wrong, the police officer or the customs agent involved
would always roll over and inform on all of the
other people involved. Recently, I've seen newer methods of smuggling cocaine across borders. I had a Russian friend
when I was in Ecuador, when I was in prison in Ecuador, who was captured with 42 tons of cocaine, which was in barrels of molasses. It had been liquidized and
mixed into the molasses. I mean, there is just
a multitude of things it can be impregnated into. Once we managed to get the tents back through customs
and into Britain safely, we would then have to extract the cocaine using chemical processes. We would normally cut
it about 60% cocaine, 40% phenacetin, and then repackage it and sell it. An early associate with whom I'd traffic drugs within the UK, so he put me in contact
with a Colombian in London who was already importing
cocaine into Britain via a contact of his in Cali, Colombia, who was operating with the Cali cartel. That became our source of
cocaine in South America. All of the cocaine we'd pay for up front using various different
money-transfer agencies, like Western Union, MoneyGram. We would always try and keep the transfers under 1,000 pounds at a time. We would use various people
to facilitate the transfers, because obviously we couldn't. Really, you can't use one person more than two or three times in a month. We had some underground
money-transfer agencies that were a bit corrupt, should we say, that would allow us to send
more than was registered. I did some workings out on the train, on the train journey down
here today, to London. So, from every $100 or 100 pounds' worth of cocaine that you buy, I would estimate that
about 2%, 1.5% to 2%, goes to the farmer who's
growing the coca leaf. Probably 35% to 40% goes to the cartel. But the cartels are, really, they're controlling the lab and then the shipping
out of South America. The remainder, we'll just say around 60%, would probably go to the dealers on the street. Much the same as OPEC
controls the supply of oil, the cartels control the
supply and flow of cocaine. The problem with drug trafficking is you're only going to be
able to do it for so long before you get caught. In the operation that I was carrying out, we tried to keep the
number of people involved to as small as possible,
because obviously, the less people know,
the less chance of it that somebody's going to
turn informant or betray you. The group that we had,
that was me, a Colombian, and a Chilean who were the key players. And then, obviously, we
would employ passengers to bring the tents back in. Well, after the Colombian
and the Chilean were arrested in a laboratory that was
raided in Crystal Palace, the Colombian was turned
by the British police and became an informant. We then started to see police activity around us quite frequently. So it became very much
a game of cat and mouse between them and us. I was arrested in Ecuador in 2005 and ended up getting sentenced to 12 years in prison in Ecuador. I was diagnosed with complex PTSD, which is post-traumatic stress disorder, after having seen so much mayhem and death and destruction
in prison in Ecuador. I would say that the levels
of cocaine being produced are greater than ever these days. Even though there's
ever-greater demand for cocaine, the purity of cocaine has also increased, I think, because of the
increased production levels. We're now in the internet era. Encrypted technologies,
encrypted telephones, encrypted messaging services, and dozens of them. Nowadays, there's so
many ways, better ways, of transferring money around the world, such as bitcoin, ethereum. These are definitely being
used in the drug trade for facilitating large movements of cash. So it's a lot harder for the authorities to keep on top of all of this. In order to keep up with it,
the cartels have realized that you're always
going to be able to sell pure cocaine quicker
than you are cut cocaine. The sort of mafias, like the Albanians and the Russians and the Chinese, they are now sending their own
people out to South America to just buy the cocaine
from the cartels there, and then basically say goodbye to them and then facilitate
their own shipping back. So then that means they, then, have the whole share of the profit. The Albanian Mafia's
now very much in control of the whole trafficking
enterprise in Britain and Europe. And I think it's become
very much more controlled, very much more monopolized
than it used to be. There used to be smaller
people, like myself. Those smaller players have
been forced out of the market by the fact that the Albanians and the like of the Albanians have just got it stitched up. In my opinion, the government
can't win the war on drugs, and they're fully aware that they can't win the war on drugs. And if you talk to a lot
of high-ranking police, they will definitely tell you that the war on drugs is unwinnable. And in my personal opinion, the only way that the war on drugs will be won is to legalize all drugs, manufacture them under
license and strict control, and then tax them heavily in order to offset the
detrimental cost to society. Really, the key element in this is the financial gain of criminals. If you can take out the financial gain from the whole equation, then there's no incentive for
criminals to traffic drugs. So I don't think that
throwing more and more money at a border force and
trying to control it — and, say, eradication of crops. I mean, they've tried eradicating crops, and that only had a detrimental effect on the people on the ground, because it destroyed other crops as well and led to disease and illness
and contaminated water. It's huge business, it being kept illegal, because it actually
creates more employment and more monetary gain, overall, for law enforcement, for
prisons, for the judiciary, for healthcare, for these drug companies making drugs that help with treatments. I got into selling drugs at an early age. I always had sort of an
entrepreneurial streak, but drugs was, at that
time, quite easy to do, and a lot of people seemed to be doing it. There were illegal raves every weekend, and loads of the people
at the opposite school started going to these parties. So, you know, instantly
there was a huge marketplace. Until I was arrested at 17, when I was at college, which put a stop to everything. You know, I saw how upset my family were, and I was worried about
not getting into university and jeopardizing my future. Trying to survive on a student loan, I realized that they don't go very far. That's when I first came
into contact with cocaine. Started selling cocaine
to a couple of students. Before I knew it, I was then selling cocaine
to the locals in Cardiff, and then I was selling to their dealers, and then I was selling
to their dealers in turn, and before I know it, I'm
supplying half of South Wales. And then ended up fanning out and spreading out into
the Bristol party scene and supplying loads of people there. The first time that I went
to prison, in England, I — I mean, yeah, I did
make contacts in prison. But, yeah, I suppose you
do make contacts in prison. I mean, they are the
finishing school of crime. Anywhere you go into prison,
anywhere on the planet, you will end up making contacts, because that's the nature
of the places that they are. I'm now going into schools,
colleges and universities, trying to educate people on the harm that cocaine, and drugs in general, do. It'll only end up with you
being captured or killed. And the effect that that will have on your family and friends is devastating. Since getting released from prison, I wrote a book called "El Infierno," which is published by Ebury Penguin, which is all about my
time in prison in Ecuador. I'm currently writing the
prequel to that first book, and I'm hoping to get the two
of them made into a screenplay in order to make a Netflix
series or possibly a film. I have set up my own company with a view to making my
own chocolate products, chocolate drinks and bars, importing cacao from Ecuador. Not cocaine, cacao. So, yeah, we're going straight this time. My name is Shaun Attwood. I smuggled over
$10 million worth of ecstasy into America from Holland. This is how crime works. At the height of the ecstasy ring, I had about 200 people working for me. Largest-ever shipment was 40,000 pills, and we were competing against an underboss for the Gambino crime family, "Sammy the Bull" Gravano. When I was active, the capital for ecstasy
manufacture was Holland. Five of the most common ones back then were white doves, Mitsubishis, euro dollars, Teletubbies, dollar signs. A pure ecstasy pill should
be 100 to 125 milligrams of MDMA and clay. So, they put the powder into the press, and it comes out with a logo on it. The recipe for ecstasy has changed because the government has clamped down on the original ingredients for ecstasy. So, you've got these cartels
and big criminal enterprises who don't care about the
purity of the product putting all kinds of mixed chemicals in. People sometimes put food coloring in them to make a distinct branding. Most of the pills that had
the food coloring in them were not the pure presses, the base presses from Holland. Every time a new pill came out, people would say, "This is the bomb," "This has got double-stacked MDMA in it." But generally, if it's 100
to 125 milligrams of MDMA, you're going to get the same hit. At the height of the ecstasy operation, we could commission a pill to
be designed in a certain way, but we opted not to because we believed it would
attract law enforcement. On the website DanceSafe, they had all of the pills, photos of them, and they gave the exact
ingredients in the pills. So we were already in very good standing for the quality of our product. I was there when the rave
scene began in Arizona. I knew everybody. It was all the local little
cliques that came to me to invest in the parties and the E deals. The first clubs I scored individually from was a little rave called Chupa and the Silver Dollar Club. We were getting them for,
like, $25, $30 a pill. This is 1996, 1997. So we set up a deal whereby, I can't remember if it
was 500 or 1,000 out of LA for just over $10 a pill. So that's when we
realized that we needed to meet demand to get greater quantities and to get them at reduced
prices to go through Holland. To source pills from Holland, I had to put people on flights with the testing kits
and say, "Hit the clubs." They would find the people
selling them in the clubs, and they would come home with the samples. And if the samples were good, then the person would go back out and we would establish
a deeper connection. It's very covert. It's all done in hotel rooms. People show up. You got your testing kit. They hand over the pills; you hand over the bills. You don't know a lot of
the background information as to what's going on, and that's probably to
protect the enterprises that are running it. Once we started to source
pills out of Holland, we were getting tens of
thousands per shipment, but we didn't have to do it as often then. It might be every month, every couple of months,
something like that. Wild Man, my best friend from childhood, became my main bodyguard in Arizona. When Wild Man was on his first stay, he opened the door into
a world of gangsters, contacts I wouldn't have made. And I got to meet all these characters. And one of them in particular, he was in a situation with the cops, and we protected him, and he said, "From now on, me and my
brothers have got your back." And that was the New Mexican Mafia. We were schooled by the New Mexican Mafia. This is the most powerful, dangerous mafia in Arizona at the time. They tried to assassinate
the head of the prisons, the head of the Department of Corrections. They said to me, "Shaun, if you get pulled over leaving our house, the cops don't have a right
to get in your vehicle unless they have probable cause. They're going to ask you,
'Can I search your vehicle?' You can say, 'No, I'm in a hurry.' And if they insist on
searching the vehicle and they find something
without probable cause, that is the fruit of the forbidden tree. We will post your bail bond right away, we will have a lawyer come
and visit you right away, and the lawyer will tell
you what, realistically, what kind of trouble you are in." The reason I wasn't bumping
heads with the cartel and I wasn't bumping heads
with the New Mexican Mafia is they had harder drugs locked down. I was never in competition with them. So, in the beginning from Holland, we were doing it through the mail. We hollowed out stock
market annual reports, and we used some edible
glue stuff to seal them all. And then they'd be put in a box and FedExed to an address in Arizona. And we had various addresses. I flew people over from the UK, built up credit in their names, rented houses in their names, and bought cars in their names, all for use within the
criminal enterprise. We would go from Hermosillo Airport. We would fly over to Mexico City. Then you could take Air France to Paris, and then you'd get the
train over to Holland. Back then, this was before 9/11. This may sound really
lackadaisical to some people, but you could just throw
them in your luggage in, like, pillowcases, thousands
and thousands of pills. Now, it was more strategic than just them getting off
the plane at Hermosillo and then coming over the Arizona border. We rented properties in
Puerto Peñasco, Rocky Point, and the smugglers who
brought them into Mexico would take them to those locations. Then the pills would be
divided up into vehicles and smugglers that had, for
example, brand-new SUVs, University of Arizona stickers on them, diving tanks, all kinds
of tourist bric-a-brac. And in particular, if it was spring break or one of the student holidays, the checkpoints were so backed up. They were so overwhelmed. You know, you got so
many guys stopping cars. We never, ever got caught bringing them over the Arizona border. It was flawless. "Better Call Saul," these people exist. They may seem like stereotypes, but they're based on what's
really happening in America. I mean, there's so much money in drugs. So, I was No. 1. I was coordinating the operations. Wild Woman was No. 2. She's from Liverpool. Wild Man was No. 3. Three English people at the top. The rest were all local
people from America. Mostly, people originated in Arizona. We had it structured like a corporation. I divided it into factions. So then you've got the
head of each faction, they've got middle people, and they've got runners
who are selling them at the street level. In my enterprise, the
main rules were loyalty, not snitching, passing
information up the chain. If you found anything out at
street level that was a threat, that information gets
fed right back to me. I chose people primarily who
did not have criminal records. My right-hand man, Cody
Bates, he's dead now, he hired cars and rented houses just for cash and pills
that nobody knew about. I'm living in a million-dollar
house on a mountainside, the most beautiful place
I've ever lived in my life, in a gated, guarded community. As more people work for me, I realized it was in the best interest to spread the product out
amongst various locations, amongst various factions. So, as soon as a shipment came in that was tens of thousands, we'd want to get that out right away, spread out to the different locations. Because if one gets hit, with 2,000 pills, that's no big deal. That's the cost of doing business. But if we've got 40,000 in one house and that gets hit, that's a serious loss. At the height of it, we had people from other
states coming to us. Even people would fly from Chicago and states on the other side
of America to come to us. We had pagers. Never spoke about big deals
on the phone to anyone. Cody Bates, he had the house
rented where the product was, where the cash was that nobody knew about, and he would do the rounds. So, he would drop off to
the head of each faction, pick up the cash. If everything was going
smoothly, that was fine. If there were problems, that's where we'd bring
in Wild Man and G-Dog, and they would handle the
enforcement side of it. With the shipment that was 40,000 pills, let's say I'm getting $10
at a minimum, on average, and I'm paying $2 to $3. I'm making $7 or $8 on 40,000, which is a couple hundred
grand, I think, profit from one mission. To launder the money, I
flew people from the UK, opened stock market, bank accounts, and credit accounts in their names. Slowly built all this credit up and kept all this money
in a legal kind of way whereby I hadn't done
anything criminal to it yet. But once the enterprise was massive and I knew I had to burn
through these accounts and these names, I just
started investments in rave clothing and music stores. Now, if you're a store that throws raves, then when you've thrown
a rave at the weekend, you've got tens of thousands in cash going in the bank on Monday. You add my ecstasy proceeds to that. We're getting the money
into the banking system. Before Sammy the Bull
Gravano entered the scene, I had a reputation for getting the white and beige
presses out of Holland. And that was the primary
source of supply to Arizona, to the raves and to the clubs. What you've got to bear
in mind is people say, if Sammy the Bull Gravano
was in competition with you, this is the Italian Mafia,
the Gambino crime family. But that's not true. Sammy the Bull is a formidable
character in his own right. He murdered people,
conspired to murder them. But he was the highest-ranking
member of the Mafia to turn sides and testify and cooperate. And he went against Gotti. I did something that was silly. We found a property that
we believe was linked to Sammy the Bull's people. And we all got strapped up and kicked the door in and held the people and took all their stuff as an act of, you know, showing that if
you do something to us, something's going to happen to you guys. But I regretted doing that. I shouldn't have never put
myself in that situation, because kicking someone's door
in and running down the hall with a gun where they
could have all had guns and just shot us all,
the cops could have come, that was drug-fueled insanity,
looking back on it now. It made things worse. There
was a hit put out on me. They were offering $10,000 for
my head on a silver platter. In prison, Sammy the Bull Gravano's son told me that someone had called it in in Phoenix, The Crowbar, it's called. I was there with G-Dog, Wild Man, and some of my crew, Wild Woman. A strip-tease woman had spotted me. There was a bounty on
me. She called it in, and they were in a car coming
to take me out to the desert. G-Dog, Wild Man advised me to leave because they'd sensed the
atmosphere had changed. And I got out of there just before Gravano's son Gerard arrived. He said that if the
ransom hadn't been paid, they were going to kill me, and that would've just
wiped out their competition. Sammy the Bull's enterprise came up, did big numbers, lit the scene up, had all the runners running
around the raves and clubs saying, "We're the biggest drug barons in the history of the world," these steroid-head jock characters, which totally brought
the heat to the scene. And that's why he got popped
a couple years before me. So, I mean, I was thanking
the cops for his arrest, basically, in my mind. But all of those resources
were then turned on me. It was May 16th, 2002,
when the SWAT team came. I thought once I quit the importation, I got away with it. I thought they had catch
you with the drugs. All it takes is someone from
your past, within seven years, the statute of limitations,
to tell the cops they've done a deal with
you, and they've got you. Don't need the drugs. We used the lawyer from
the New Mexican Mafia. He was a loophole lawyer.
Paid him $100,000. And that's how we got
it down from 200 years to 9 ½ years without snitching. My first jail was Towers Jail, where the neo-Nazis come up to me. To join the gang, to be a member, you have to murder someone for them. There are very few members. There are a lot of probates, associates, people putting work in for them that are running the system for them. Arizona, the four major prison gangs, it's all racially divided. The whites is the Aryan Brotherhood. The Blacks is the Mau Mau. The Mexican nationals have their own gang. And then you've got the Chicanos, which are the Mexican Americans. You've got the Native Americans as well. And then anyone who doesn't
fit in, heaven help them, because it's just raw
survival of the fittest. Being deep in the Arizona jail system, the absolute priority of all of the gangs is to keep the drugs
business running smoothly. You've got the staff
bringing the drugs in. You've got the visitors
bringing the drugs in. They do not want anything to disrupt that. I've done some PSA videos,
prison survival advice. Be careful what you say. Don't brag. Don't let them
know you've got money. Don't let them know you've got resources. Two months after my arrest, there was a story in
the Phoenix New Times. "English Shaun's Evil
Empire," 10 pages long. The neo-Nazis caught wind of this, and then they were pressuring
me to ask my girlfriend to smuggle drugs in through visitation because I must have all
of these drug connections. Fortunately, there was a race riot, and those guys who were trying
to pressure me got moved, and I cliqued up with
the Italians after that, and that pressure on me ended. I end up in a jail run by a famous sheriff
called Sheriff Joe Arpaio. Over time, you just saw
them. Revolving door. Young people coming in
with lesser offenses becoming harder criminals. It is a college of crime. The conditions in that jail, the cockroaches, the
dead rats in the food, the guards murdering the prisoners. For the vast majority of the
people I was housed with, there was no hope. But that's what keeps
the prisons in business. The illegal black market in drugs created by drug laws is so vast. And now we've got hundreds of
thousands of dead in Mexico and all this knife crime in London. This is what the cops are telling us revolves around young people competing for the black-market profits
and drugs created by drug laws. I was operating during a
relatively innocent phase of the introduction of ecstasy to America. Now everything is monopolized
by organized crime, and it doesn't matter who gets
arrested in organized crime. They always have the resources
to pay the officials off, to keep the drugs flowing. I lost absolutely everything. Spent six years incarcerated. There's a clip where I'm
at an airport in London, I think it's Gatwick or Heathrow, and I'm all shell-shocked
looking, hugging mom, dad, sister. Mom's crying in the
car out of the airport. Stayed at my parents' house for a year. The dole was sending me on, like, telesales interviews and stuff like that. I'd tell them, you know,
criminal record, yes. Couldn't get a job. Dole's telling me you've
gotta start lying, telling them you've not
got a criminal record, or you're never going to get a job. But a year later, I
moved down to Guildford. Lived with DJ Mike Hot Wheels,
one of my best friends. Lived in his bedroom for 10 years just doing my blog, building my socials. We started the blog in 2004, started the YouTube channel in 2007. It was the first prison YouTube channel. I'd go up and down the
country interviewing the most interesting people.
I'm blessed, you know. So many wonderful people came into my life to give me a leg up and
help me get my message out. And I feel it's my karmic destiny now that we've got this platform to help other guys share their story. It was the late 1980s, and all of a sudden, on
the weekends, on the news, there was these stories
of cops chasing around young people who were wide-eyed, wearing baggy jeans with, like, acid, LSD logos on them and stuff. In my economics class, I had a mate. He's like, "You need to
come and check this out." And then we went to the Thunderdome, Oldham Road, Manchester. So he was like, "Bear with me. I'll go and get you the stuff." So, I took the pill, and then once I started
dancing, I never wanted to stop. I never wanted the party to end. And I was like, "Whew,
I finally found myself." And that's how raving became my religion. So, going back generations of my family, some settled in Chicago, some retired in Arizona. I had two aunts. Two of my dad's sisters
ended up in Arizona, and one of them I would visit as a kid. When the airplane comes
in to land, you look out, and you see all the swimming
pools in the backyards. So I was already thinking, "Hm, I might want some of this
when I finish university." That's what I did. If I could go back and tell
myself one piece of advice, it would be stay on the path of slow and steady progress in life. I started following the
stock market when I was 16. I was worth a couple of million in the stock market in my late 20s. That was before all this drug activity. I didn't need the money. It was ego. My ego was as big as the Grand
Canyon at the top of this. Pablo Escobar was worth billions. His brother said, "Let's
buy our own island and kick back and not get
arrested and not get killed and not spend the rest
of our lives in prison." Pablo said, "I put the president in power. I've got 10,000 people working for me. You want me to kick back
on some boring old island?" It's not money. It's ego and being a
character in the scene. I'm Neil Woods, a former
undercover police officer. I used to infiltrate
drug-dealing gangs in the UK. And this is "How Crime Works." Drug crime is entirely different from any other forms of
criminality. Entirely different. If the police catch a drug
dealer, crime goes up, because there is an
unlimited number of people wanting to take that opportunity. What happens over time is, at every level, is where police catch street drug dealers, they help create monopolies. So if you catch a dealer
who controls half a city, the dealer who's most able
to take opportunity of that is the guy that controls the other half. In essence, it's an
extremely hostile environment because only the most controlling and hostile gangs are the ones who are the most successful. Policing drugs has made the heroin and crack cocaine markets in the UK and around the world much more hostile, but
also much more competitive. Because people get arrested,
this creates opportunities. And if you consider that
if the police catch a gang which controls a quarter of a city, then the gang that is most capable and able to take up that opportunity and take over control of
that quarter of the city is a gang that already controls another quarter of the city. So it makes for a very combative and competitive marketplace. The target customers of
those organized-crime groups is the most problematic
consumers of those commodities. The most hardcore 10% of heroin consumers consume 50% of the market
value of that heroin. So you can see just
how much money there is in dominating or exploiting
that hardcore 10%. You can make an
extraordinary amount of money with dealing with relatively few people. I realized that I had to
understand the people around me, which meant understanding
a group of people that I'd previously had a
huge amount of stigma for. And I had to readdress that quite quickly, because I had to know about -- I had to function like them. But I quickly realized that those people were in a pattern of behavior that was out of their control because of what had happened to them. And that was important to understand, because by understanding that, I could understand how organized
crime was exploiting them and how I could appear
to be exploited myself and therefore get the
credibility to climb the ladder, buy increasingly large amounts of drugs, and network with the right people. The most significant dealer, or the most significant
foot soldier, I suppose, and at the bottom rung of organized crime, is the most exploited person
in the whole supply chain. And that is the user-dealer. It's somebody who is supplying drugs to fund their own habit. More often than not, they're doing that because they've been forced
to do so by organized crime. But they're the most important
person to get to know, because they are the person
that organized crime relies on. Or, nowadays, it's quite often children who are the dealers to rely
on for organized crime. A user-dealer, from
wherever they're living, they would go where they're
told in the early morning to where the next-rung-up dealer would be, and they would be given the package. And more often than not, that package would already be
weighed into specific deals and sealed up, heat-sealed in plastic, and given to that dealer, and there would be an agreement that he could take a percentage of those as long as he sold the total number. Now, if you were to
ask me how the day went for the person running
a team of user-dealers, that gangster running a quarter of a city, say for example, most of those people I've met have been quite professional. They haven't used any drugs, they have been efficient, they have got up in the morning early, and they usually do it in shifts. They'll split a morning
shift and a late shift, and they'll do it in rotation as a team. They will check which SIM
card goes in their phone or which phone they're using for the day. They will have a separate SIM
with a database of numbers which are of most use to them. They will check in with their companions, and they will meet up with the person that they're working with for that day. And what that would normally mean is that they will have a driver. They will sit in the back
of a car quite often, and they will be driven around where they will be either doing
deliveries to user-dealers, sometimes meeting in the back of that car, or sometimes meeting at remote locations, which will change on a rotational basis or on a whim. They will keep a careful eye on locations where there is a stash, where they are stashing
their next resupply of drugs. They will also keep tabs on people who are doing the measuring-out
and the heat-sealing to make sure that they're
doing that correctly. They will constantly be in contact with whoever is tasked in the policing of those people to make sure everyone is staying honest and working according to the team ethos, shall I say, and that makes sure that
no one's ripping them off. In essence, it's an extremely
hostile environment, but I have to reiterate, it's the presence of people
like me in that marketplace and it's general drugs policing and the use of police informants which creates that desperately
violent marketplace. The gangs that are the most successful are the ones who are most able and willing to use immediate violence. And so that threat of
violence and that intimidation becomes one of the most
important tools of the trade. So they need to give tighteners to people, they need to constantly
build their reputation. So if there is a group of sex workers who are committed to buying the heroin or crack from that gang, then they will remind them of that, and they will use violence to do so. I had actually given up undercover work just before the Burger
Bar Boys investigation. But I was manipulated,
persuaded into doing it because two other undercover operatives had tried to get close to them, and they'd not got close, dangerously not got close. But it was an extraordinary
amount of work, and it had really serious ups and downs. So, I went to Northampton and I picked on two vulnerable
people to manipulate. And I decided these were the people who were going to eventually introduce me to the Burger Bar Boys. Because I knew they
were connected to them. I knew that they'd been
dealing for them at one point. And after lots of work, I eventually persuaded
them to introduce me to the Burger Bar Boys. And that was a terrifying experience. And so I was directed to
where they were holding court, their little headquarters
at the snooker club. I was directed to the
washrooms, the door burst open, and this hooded figure went
into the toilet cubicle and stood on the toilet and looked over, and he said, "What's this?" And he kept asking other questions and then rephrasing the questions, trying to catch me out. I knew the guy looking
down at me from the cubicle was implicated in seven different murders. In particular, I knew he was the person who'd sourced two submachine guns for a multiple murder of two women. Then four hooded figures came in, and as the door bashed open and they started walking around me, every so often one would headbutt me on the side of the head on the ear. And I was getting jostled
around more and more. And then all of a sudden he said, "All right, then. What do you want?" As soon as he said the words, "All right, then. What do you want?" The four hooded figures had walked out. And I said, "I'll have
one on one, please," which meant I'll have
a 1.4 deal of heroin, 1.4 deal of crack. And I handed over my 40 pounds, and he gave it to me looking down on me. And then I got his phone number. He put Woody, he actually put my name in the phone, his phone. And I started to buy increasing
amounts from them more often and gather evidence of
conspiracy against the gang. I was in. The most important task that I had, to get that phone number, to get that beginnings of trust, I'd got it. That was it. It was just the most intense operation. There was always something, and there was always
that threat of violence. It never went away. Never went away, not for one minute. And, anyway, seven months, it lasted. And I was pleased to think by the end of that seven months that I'd gathered evidence
against 96 people, the six main gangsters
plus 90 other people. And I knew there was no one else to meet. There were no new phone numbers, there was no names I
hadn't heard of already. I'd caught everyone. There were police from
five different counties, hundreds of people involved
in the arrest phase. Loads of doors being smashed in. And a week or so after the event, I spoke to the intel
officer, and he said to me, "Yep, we managed to interrupt the heroin and crack cocaine supply in Northampton for a full two hours." All of the belief I had that had been eroding
away over those years, and it had been eroding away, I had to give in to the
evidence before my eyes, really, and realize that this is futile. Now, what this does is
it increases corruption. If you have allowed a dealer or a gang or a cartel to increase their share of the market, then they are richer, which means they have more
money to invest in corruption. In Mexico, there used to be 20 cartels. Now there are three. Each one of those three are
richer than those 20 used to be. Sweden has an extraordinary
drug gang war going on, and they're not just using machine guns, they're using grenades. They're using IEDs. They're
blowing each other up. There's literally hundreds
of bombs going off in Sweden between drug gangs competing to control drug markets across northern Europe. This is something that we
should pay attention to, especially as Sweden takes pride in having the toughest
drug laws in Europe. Cause and effect, I would say. The most significant
change in the drug markets has been the shift of online. The dark web, the dark markets. The lack of physical contact
means there's less violence, so that's a good thing it's moved online. And also there is a way
online, in some regard, of having self-regulation, because there's reviews left, so people can increase the likelihood of better-quality commodities. Claims by FBI agents or whoever it is that they can crack codes and use hackers to bring these markets
down, it's not true. The dark markets will continue
to become more efficient as a response to policing. Since I've left the police,
I've written a memoir, and that's called "Good Cop, Bad War." My position is the position
of my organization, which is the Law Enforcement
Action Partnership. We advocate for the full
regulation of all the drug markets to take control away from organized crime. And, increasingly, we're becoming the most important voices for reform.
