Hi, my name's Pieter
Tritton, aka Posh Pete, and I'm back to tell the
whole story of how I smuggled $5 million worth of
cocaine internationally, and this is how crime works. I can't say exactly how many
operations we conducted. All that I can tell you is the judge, when it came to trial in Britain, said that they knew that we'd
imported at least 85 kilos, but they knew it was a hell of a lot more, but they could only prove it was 85 kilos. And they said they'd probably never know exactly how much we brought in, so I'm not going to give it away now. I would say that I have
fairly extensive knowledge of the quality of cocaine,
having been around it for almost every day. Well, certainly whilst I was dealing it, you build up a knowledge of the subject. After a few years, it
became fairly easy to tell where the cocaine had come
from because of its color. The way it felt between your
fingers, how oily it was, just all of those sort of things. The smell, because you can
smell the certain chemicals, like the ether, the acetone. When I was buying kilos of cocaine here, this is prior to doing
our Ecuadorian thing, say a kilo of cocaine was,
like, a creamy off-white. I would normally know it was
probably going to be from Peru. And that tended to be really good for washing up into crack cocaine. That tended to be extremely
strong for crack cocaine. Whereas you'd buy a kilo
of Bolivian cocaine, which would be pure
white, very pearlescent, very strong to sniff, but when you washed it
up into crack cocaine, it was like smoking fresh air. Would have very little effect,
which was really weird. Because cocaine has got so many variants and alkaloids in it. That's why each one, and also the chemist that's made it, they each make it to their
own sort of secret recipe. Yeah, and then you
would get the Colombian, which quite often, back in the day, there used to be what we called diesel. It used to stink of diesel
when you sniffed it, and it was very oily, and that's because it was
made with a lot of gasoline, or diesel instead of gasoline,
and poor-quality chemicals. You'd get a lot of that
coming out of Colombia, where they were using cheaper base. I suppose it's a bit
like a French vineyard. They keep the best bottles in the château, and they're more expensive, and you can only buy them there, really. The trafficking was certainly one of the most difficult
parts of the whole operation. I mean, overcoming the borders
that you have to get through, i.e., border control, customs, things like that, are by
nature the hardest parts, to some extent, of cocaine trafficking. I was in Parkhurst prison at the time. This is post 9/11 happening. So there was all heightened
security of the ports and airports, and a lot of
drug traffickers were getting caught inadvertently in amongst
the heightened security. And I'd read an article about the process of impregnating cocaine
into plastic or rubber. So, having read this, I realized that that was
really going to be the future of certainly cocaine trafficking, that the days of importing
blocks of cocaine or bags of powder were
really done and dusted because of the advent of scanners, X-rays, and just all the heightened
security that was on its way. This got me thinking and
led, eventually, to me using that method of impregnation to import the cocaine
into not only Britain but various other European countries. We would turn the cocaine, well, first put it into a
solution, like a solvent, and then we would mix
it with liquid latex, which is used as, I think, artificial skin and
various other applications. We would then let that set until it dried in very thin panels. To anybody else's point of view, it would be a piece of rubber. So we would then put those into
the ground sheets of tents, so that it appeared as a part
of the fabric of the tent. And then that would be
smuggled cross border using passengers by air, normally. Sometimes by sea, but
normally by air, then sea, because of the distance involved. I formed a partnership with a
Colombian and a Chilean guy. The Colombian obviously was
the conduit for the cocaine, because he was from Cali. He was a member of the Cali cartel. So, it was all very much
a family thing for them. He would source the cocaine, have it processed into the rubber latex, and he would take care of all of that end. We would normally pay him
$20,000 to $30,000 for his role, American dollars, which
obviously in Colombia is quite a lot of money, and
we're only talking between 3 and 5 kilos at a time, per tent. Sometimes we'd do two at
the same time, though. So we were partners,
and on every shipment, we would normally make
between £60,000 to £80,000, so about $100,000, each, roughly. And that's after costs. We would pay a passenger, or a drug mule, as they're called, to travel out to whichever country we'd be using as the transit country, and we'd pay them between
£10,000 and £12,000, so about $15,000. But it wasn't dependent upon
the quantity of cocaine. So it could've been 1 or 5 kilos; we'd still pay them the same. We'd cover their hotel costs, flights, all that sort of stuff. So, for the initial one that we did, which was 5 kilos, cost us about £30,000. So in dollars, probably
about $35,000, $40,000. And that bought us 5 kilos
of cocaine in Colombia and paid for it to be transformed into latex or rubber and paid for all the work to be done. And then obviously the
guy's salary was separate. Sometimes if we made a lot more money here in Britain by cutting of the cocaine, we would give them an extra bonus. So, around the time that we started doing our importation of cocaine using this impregnation method, that method was fairly new on the scene. By turning it into rubber or
plastic or something like that, it becomes very difficult for the authorities to detect, because it's not only invisible, it's actually changed. Its physical state is now something else that it wasn't before. You imagine how many tons
of rubber and plastic come across a border every
day into every country, by air, by sea, by land. I mean, it's astronomical tonnage. And for them to be able to capture even a small amount of this,
they'd have to know really that it was actually in — someone would have to tell them that there's cocaine in that
rubber for them to know because it was that good
a way of trafficking that we didn't lose a single passenger in the entire time that we were working. A lot of cartels and drug
traffickers in general, they're coming up with
new methods and new ways of getting drugs from A to B to evade the authorities. I'd heard about people
impregnating cocaine into clothing by having the cocaine in a solution, then soaking the clothing in
the cocaine, letting it dry. But obviously it's very visible, because it crystallizes on the surface and you can see the texture
of the clothing will change to become quite stiff, almost
like it's overstarched, and also the dog could detect that. Whereas with the method
that we were using, the dog couldn't detect it. I mean, we'd heard of other methods. You could impregnate it into paper or cardboard, again simply by soaking
it into the material. But the fact that we were changing it into rubbers or latex is what I liked the most about it, and it just seemed like the safest, best method at the time. The key players in our operation in the cocaine market in Britain, there were only really the
three of us at the top. And then below us,
obviously we had drivers. We were using safe houses. At one point, we had an accountant keeping track of all of the
outgoings and incomings, just so that we made sure
that we were making profits and just exactly how much we were making. We ran it as if it was a business. Obviously we had a couple of customers that we would deliver the stuff to, and below them there was
a big pyramid of dealers where the material got broken down further and further down the chain. I've got a vague memory
of the police saying that when I was arrested,
they estimated that there were somewhere between 300
and 400 people involved, because of all the people
below that I had no idea about. Basically, we tried to keep
things as safe as possible by letting as few as possible people know about what we were doing. So, we narrowed the number of people that we were supplying
the cocaine down to, I think it was two or
three people, key people. So all of the cocaine
would just go to them, because we didn't really
need loads of people. We were quite happy
just to sell it in bulk, give it to one or two people,
and have done with it. So we thought that would
keep it safe as well, because these were people
that we really trusted. When it came to finding passengers, it got a bit tricky because obviously you could only use a
passenger once or twice, and then you'd have to find somebody else. And out of everything, I think that was one of the weakest points or weakest elements, were the passengers. Because once they'd done that
job and they'd been paid, it was quite likely that they
would maybe talk to somebody, be it their girlfriend, their friends, and then it would've been quite
possible for their friends to then tell their friends. That's how it goes. We were looking to scale things up and eliminate that risk
factor of using passengers and scale things up and do it by sea using shipping containers, because then there were
no passengers involved. When we set the operation
up, we also put in place a certain number of ground rules. One of the rules particularly was that if
anybody was working for us, or during the time that we were working, no one was allowed to use drugs or alcohol or party in any way, shape, or form so that we were thinking straight. Obviously another rule was that no one was allowed to know
where the laboratory was, when we were extracting the cocaine, apart from the people involved, i.e., the chemist and us three. Another rule that we put in, I call it a rule, was that if any of us got arrested, that whoever was left
out and not in prison was sort of duty bound to
look after the families of the others that were in prison and make sure that their rent was paid, their food was paid, bills,
utilities, everything. I was actually in Cali at the time, having a meeting with the
guy, our connection there, when the police raided a laboratory in Crystal Palace back in London and discovered my two business partners in the lab processing the cocaine, but they'd broken one of our main rules, being that nobody, absolutely nobody, should know where the lab was, because that was another
really big weak link, because if you think about it, having a lab in a static point for more than two or
three days is obviously, is very easily, or it's very easy to take out. If the police find out where it is, it's easy to raid because
it's not going anywhere. It's there. The chemicals are there. So, like I say, I was in Cali at the time, and all of the phones in
London went off suddenly. My Colombian business partner,
he quite quickly found out that they'd all been arrested, and they had basically been
having a party in the lab. They'd had friends in there,
music, parties going on, drinking, doing cocaine. When I found out, I was
extremely angry, to be honest, because it almost ended the — well, it did end the operation initially, for a certain amount of time. But left everything in
my hands, basically. So I then carried things on whilst they were still in prison. The first trip, I did myself simply because I wanted to do it, A, to make sure it got back. And I thought, well, it's the
first one that we're doing, so it's highly unlikely that
I'm going to get arrested, because nobody knows
that we're doing it yet. It's the first one. And I kind of wanted
to experience the whole run of things, and I didn't want to start
sending passengers or drug mules to do something that I
hadn't already done myself. So, I had done all the
tourist sort of stuff. I'd gone to Cotopaxi volcano, I'd done a couple of
other touristy-type things around Quito, gone to the museums, and whilst doing that, I'd
collected loads of brochures and stuff to back up my story. And I'd forgotten about
the luggage allowance, the weight allowance that you're allowed to take through the airport. So, when I got back to the airport, the tent that I'd been
given on this occasion to carry through weighed
about 30 or 40 kilos. It was huge. A 10-man tent. Plus 5 kilos of cocaine in it. I'd also bought my family
things like ceramic plates, leather jackets, loads of heavy gifts. Just completely forgotten. Get to the airport, and I think I was, like, 100 kilos over my allowance of 30 kilos. So obviously that's rung an alarm bell straight away with the
airline, which was KLM. So they said, "Look, why don't
you get rid of this tent?" Because they said, "You
either have to get rid of some of the weight, or
you've got to pay a huge" ... what do they call it? Like a fine. To see you onto the plane. And at the time, I just didn't have the
money on me to pay the fine. And I thought, well, I'll just get rid of some of these gifts that I've got. So anyway, they've said, "Why don't you get rid of the tent?" And there's me saying, "Well,
I can't get rid of the tent." Obviously. So, that must have
looked really weird to them. So, in front of the airline
staff at the check-in desk, I've given away all of
these gifts to the people working in the shops at the
airport and the restaurants. So they all thought it was Christmas, getting all these
brand-new leather jackets and ceramic plates. So the airline staff
must've been watching this and thinking, "This guy's
obviously up to something." You know what I mean? I'm traveling on my own, single male. All of the red flags had been ticked and going up. So anyway, I get on the plane,
land at Schiphol Airport, and sure enough, there's a line of Dutch
drug-enforcement agents waiting. And all the passengers are having to file through them. And I knew right then and there
that I was getting stopped. So, sure enough, I get
to the front of the queue and they pull me in, and they say, "Right, we need to talk to you." So they put me in a holding
room with about 30 or 40 people, only three or four of which were European, and all the rest South American. I thought, "Well, I'm done for here." Do you know what I mean?
"There's no going home." Eventually, I get called into the office, and they say, "What have you been doing?" And I said, "I've been
to Cotopaxi volcano. I was there on tourism. I'd always wanted to go to South America." Just gave them all the
spiel about being a tourist, laid down all the brochures, said I'd been here,
there. Blah, blah, blah. And I thought, any minute now, they're going to plunk this tent down on the desk in front of me
and go, "And what's this?" And it didn't happen. And
after about 20 minutes, 20, 30 minutes of questioning, they said, "Oh, really
sorry to have detained you. You're free to go catch your connecting flight," which was to Stansted. So I get on the plane,
and I'm fully expecting to be arrested when I get back to Britain. And land at Stansted Airport, there's the tent going round
and round on the carousel, and I'm thinking, "Shall I,
shan't I, shall I, shan't I?" And in the end, I just
thought, "Oh, to hell with it." Grabbed it, and I thought, I fully expected that
as soon as I touched it, I'd be just ... dozens of police officers
would pile on me. And nothing happened. And I was shocked. So, I've picked up this
tent, got it on a trolley, got the rest of my bags, and just walked straight
out of Stansted Airport, and I was home free. And actually coming back to the rules, that was another rule that I set myself. I thought, well, there's no
need for anybody to know when the passenger is coming
back into the country, because as long as nobody knows, then really no one can be told, i.e., the police can't be told, unless they found out some other way. When it came to finding passengers, after having done this first trip myself, we found people that didn't have certainly any criminal record for drugs, or if it was a record for drugs, only something minor like
a little bit of cannabis, but preferably people
that had a clean record, or like I say, nothing for drugs. People that were, in our eyes, trustworthy and fairly calm, people that were presentable. I think the riskiest part was
just trying to hold your nerve and not show too many nerves
going through the airport. Because if you start
looking really nervous, then they have people
trained looking for people that are showing signs of
nerves and body language. So it was a lot to do with
picking the right people that had the right demeanor and had the right sort of
body language and mindset to go through this experience. The normal passenger sits
in an airport, is bored, they're reading a
newspaper, reading a book, or getting some food or having a drink. They're not looking around,
looking at the cameras, looking at security, stuff like that. So it would just be a matter of just treating it as if you were on holiday, any other normal trip, do as you would on any other day. We tried not to give away
too many of the details to the people that we were prospecting, or interviewing, to be
possible passengers. We explained that we had
this really good method that was virtually undetectable. We didn't really tell them too
much about how it was done. We just said that it beat the scanner, it beat the X-ray, it beat the dog, and it beat virtually everything that Customs and Excise had at that time. So it was almost foolproof. That would generally encourage them. Obviously the fee that we
were paying them would help. We also tried to keep them as far away from us as possible so that in the event
that they were arrested, that there wasn't too much
circumstantial evidence connecting them to us. So we wouldn't be phoning
them up and stuff like that. We'd try and keep them at arm's length. We would give them a backstory insofar as we would say, well, we would tell them
that if the worst happened and they got arrested in South America, we would try and buy them out, because we knew how corrupt
it was in South America. So we would try and pay, we would get them a lawyer
and try and bribe them out any which way we could. If they got caught in Britain, we used to tell them to
say the old story that, "Oh, somebody asked us
to carry this bag through or this tent through." And then if and when it came to trial, get your barrister to hold
up a piece of rubber or latex in front of the jury and say to the jury, "Would any member of the jury
know that this is cocaine?" And then every single
one is going to say no, because how could you? So, right then and there, that gives an element
of doubt for the jury. That presents an element of doubt. So, in British law, as long as there's enough
reasonable doubt in a case, the defendant normally
is found not guilty. If there wasn't any phone
calls connecting us to them, and them to drug trafficking of any sort, and they were working, to the appearances of the
court, a normal citizen, working, or quite straight, then they stood a good
chance of getting off. We tried to find countries that, A, had fairly relaxed drug laws, fairly porous border force. We also started a method of, we were buying a passenger a return ticket, obviously. So, say they left from Heathrow. They'd be returning to Heathrow. As soon as we got them loaded with the tent in South America, we would then buy them a new return ticket to a different destination. So we wouldn't send them back on the original return leg of the journey. We'd try and get them back on — we would basically get them on the plane the same day they got the tent or the next day, as quick as possible. And that really worked because the police, the British police, when they arrested me
eventually, they actually told me that they were actually
waiting at the airports for the passengers coming back,
and they weren't turning up, and they didn't know what was going on. Because obviously they didn't
know that we were buying a different ticket to a different
destination just one way. So you have to know the law
to break the law, really. For us, America was a full-on no-go. I mean, there was one occasion, actually, when I went through Miami.
I wasn't carrying anything, and it served as a test
bed for us, really, because I think I was
on the way to Venezuela, and I bought a ticket transiting through Miami, and it was with American Airlines. And I phoned up American
Airlines, and I said, "Look." I think I'd recently been
released from prison, or this was the story I gave them. And I said, "I've recently
been released from prison, I've got a criminal record for
drug trafficking in Britain. If I'm just in transit through Miami, is that going to be a problem?" And they said, "No, it won't be a problem. Go ahead, buy the ticket. You'll be fine." And they got that completely
wrong. It was a big problem. What happened was I missed my
flight at Heathrow to Miami. So they stuck me on the
next flight afterwards, I think which was a
British Airways flight, but by that point, I'd
miss my connecting flight to Caracas in Venezuela. So they said, "We'll put you
up in the airport hotel." So, I get to the front
of the queue in Miami, present my passport, and I think there's no way
they're going to let me in. And the guy stamps the passport and says, "Welcome to America," and I was like, "You've got
to be joking. You let me in." I couldn't believe it. So I go into Miami, go
to the airport hotel, check in, blah, blah, blah. And just spent three days
having a look around Miami. I got back to the airport to
get the plane to Venezuela, and the security went absolutely ape. They said, "Where have you
been? What have you been doing?" They had me in a room,
they strip-searched me, they went through all my luggage. American Airlines
obviously made a mistake. So, after that experience, and we knew America was really hot anyway, so we just avoided any sort of transit through America whatsoever. Any flights. Anything to do with America. And we also knew that if we started trafficking drugs into America itself, that they would just come for you wherever you were, basically. It didn't matter whether you
went down to the Antarctic and hid out in the North Pole
or South Pole or wherever, they were going to come
and find you eventually, like they do. So yeah, for us, America was a big no-go zone. Yeah. As far as airlines went, I think definitely the Spanish airlines were a little bit laxer. Air Iberia tended to be quite relaxed. Whereas yeah, American Airlines,
on that trip to Venezuela, you had to fill out all that visa form, and it was all loads of security. As far as getting onto the
plane with these tents, I mean, it beat the scanners, it beat
the X-ray, it beat the dog. So really, how else are
they going to find it, unless somebody tells them it's in there? I think even with the particle wand, the swabs and stuff, I think
that may have been a problem, but I think that was
only just coming into use at the time that we were doing this, and that would've only shown
traces of cocaine, anyway, and they still wouldn't have — having found traces of
cocaine with a wand, all they would've done is
then put it through a scanner or an X-ray, and it would've
shown up with nothing anyway. So they would've thought, "Oh,
somebody's been using cocaine and they dropped a bit
on the bag," or whatever. So, it doesn't really prove a great deal. I think nowadays, if you were to try and come
through an airport with, say, a kilo of cocaine or,
say, kilos of cocaine, say strapped your body or strapped your legs with tape or in the lining of a
jacket in powder form or block form, it's going to get spotted, because the body scanners are that good. Or even if you swallow capsules. I mean, or pellets, as
they used to be called. You used to get 10 or 12 ground pellets, compressed cocaine or heroin pellets. But they then, because they advanced the
technology with the scanner, so you've got the external scanner, which is looking for anything that shouldn't be on your person, but then they have the internal scanner that is looking for things
like pellets of drugs. So they actually came
up with liquid pellets. So, the drugs were again in solution, and in some sort of material that didn't break down
in the stomach acid, but it was non-detectable by X-ray. So, it appeared as if it was
liquid in your stomach or food. The cartels won't — they like to minimize their risks. So, they like to minimize their losses. So they generally try and
find people at both ends that they can bribe. And they have means and ways of bribing the border force, the Customs and Excise. You know, or maybe a baggage handler who can get the bag onto the plane or on the food trolleys that the food goes in. There's various points on a plane, if it's coming by plane,
that the drugs can be put on. If it's coming by container,
then they can be put in the air-conditioning unit externally, if it's a freezer container, obviously they've got those
big air-conditioning units. You can fit about 30 to 50
kilos inside one of those, and they can be accessed from
outside of the container. So, if you've got people in the ports, they can get into the containers or into the exterior of the container, they can hide drugs in the
fabric of the container itself, in the floor, in the
ceiling, in the walls. There's other methods, such as the group that I was working with
when I was really young, back when I was at university, they would charter a yacht,
sail to the Caribbean. They'd have a ton and a half of cocaine loaded onto a private yacht, sail it back, and then they would do
what's called coopering. So they would transfer
the cocaine out at sea. They'd have a fishing boat come out from a local fishing port, and they would transfer the cocaine from one boat to the other. So the fishing boat appears
not to have gone very far, but the yacht obviously has
come back from South America. But you think on the size
of a boat, or a ship, even. A ship is even better. They can put it in — they can attach it to the
hull of the boat underwater in waterproof containers. They can have it welded
onto the hull of the ship. Put it into liquid. Again, same sort of technique,
and then you just extract it. So, a lot of these, recently, this has become
quite a big thing in Europe. Superlabs are appearing where they are using the same methods that we were using back
all those years ago, but on a much larger scale, and then extracting it in these labs using chemicals and chemists. And you're ending up with
pure cocaine again in Europe. And it's just a hell of a lot safer, and it means that they're
not having to pay off Customs and Excise. An average shipment by container, if it's a big one, would be, like, 5 tons. Average shipment, I would say,
is probably a ton to 2 tons. That's 1,000 to 2,000 kilos at a time. Particularly if it's hidden
in the walls or in the floor, because there's only a certain
amount of space in there that you can put it in. I mean, the days of
putting it in the boxes or in amongst the fruit, the scanner is going to
pick that up, probably. But then again, you have
to bear in mind that, also, these container ports are so busy, it's generally, the police
won't waste their time, unless they know there's
something present. Unless they get a tip-off or the dock happens to detect something. Generally, the drugs will have been seized because someone has spoken or someone has been caught
further down the chain and given up the operation. And therefore, the police
know the drugs are present in a container or something. The production of the cocaine obviously takes place out in semi-jungle areas, way out in the countryside. Obviously I've met, in my time, quite a few people that have been involved in the actual producing of the cocaine, right from the farmers
up to the cartel bosses or capos. And the people at the low
end make very little money. I mean, they're farmers, they're doing it to
support their families. They grow the coca
leaves. The plant, sorry. So, they get the coca leaves off, they strim them up with strimmers, cut them up as small as possible, soak it all in kerosene to get the coca to release it into a solution, and then they use potassium permanganate to purify. There's various stages of purification ending in sulfuric acid,
basically. Sulfuric acid bath, where the cocaine forms into, well, crystallizes, basically. They then fish that out, press out some of the chemicals, and then you've got your kilo of cocaine. Obviously I've simplified
the steps somewhat, but yeah, the people involved generally are just people trying to
support their families. Obviously, the value of the coca crop is generally more than the value of growing
bananas or coffee beans. Say we sold a kilo of cocaine for an average of about £25,000. $28,000 to $35,000, roughly. Something like that. Because, I mean, if you think
you can buy a kilo of cocaine in Ecuador for $2,000, pure,
packaged, ready to be shipped, if you go out, right out
into the countryside, into the jungle to a lab, you can buy it there
for as little as $800. $700, $800. Pure cocaine. And that's after it's been
processed. All the chemicals. All the people involved
there have been paid. So out of that, probably the
farmer's going to end up, or will have been paid, maybe $200 or $300? Maybe a bit more. It depends how much of the
processing he does as well. But, I mean, they're producing
maybe 1,000 kilos a week. 2,000 a week. But again, like I say, to make 1 kilo is an acre of land. So to make 1,000, you
need 1,000 acres of land, and that's quite a lot. So generally, these people
producing the cocaine, they're not just buying
the leaves from one farmer. They'll have various farmers. And I think, generally,
the farmers normally have maybe 30 acres, if that. 30 to 40 acres. Because you can't really have 1,000 acres of land. It's a big hole in a jungle
that's all coca leaf, and it's pretty visible, even
from space, I would imagine. So, that's why it has to
be done in little bits, and obviously land
costs money as well, so. I guess they buy it, well, they definitely buy
it from various farmers. So, once that had been made, we would have — it gets transported
into cities to be sold. The people that I was involved
with were all from Cali, all interconnected with the Cali cartel and the paramilitaries. They would make it up
into the latex or rubber. So they would do all the processing there, get the tent made up, and then get ready to transport the tent to a third country who, it
was really a transit country, like Ecuador, where they don't really produce so much cocaine
in their own right. Whilst I was in Parkhurst
prison and having read this article about this shipment
of cocaine being seized, coming in by a shipping container, that was impregnated in
plastic garden furniture, I then spoke to my codefendants, or one of my codefendants, and I said, "Look, when I get out of prison, I kind of want to go straight, not be involved in drug trafficking. But if you get a phone
call from me one day, it's going to be because I want you to try and get us a connection with someone who can get us cocaine in
South America, basically, so we can start importing cocaine direct from South America into Britain and cut out all the middlemen. Someone that could get
it impregnated for us. Do all of that." Time went by, got released from prison, went straight for a while, and then decided not to go straight. Made the phone call, phoned
up my friend and said, "Look, can you try and
find us a Colombian, a Bolivian, Peruvian? Someone that could source
us cocaine in South America, and preferably have it made into rubber or impregnated in some form." So, he went away, and
after about two weeks phoned me up and said, "Look, I've managed to get ahold of
a Colombian and a Chilean guy down in South London in Kennington who are interested in me. They're selling cocaine." So, initially, I didn't want
to just go in there and go, "Oh, you know, this is my idea." I thought, I'll go see what they're like. So, a friend in South Wales gave me the money to go and
buy a kilo of coke from them. So, went and bought the first
kilo of cocaine from them. They seemed OK. So, came back a week later to buy another kilo of cocaine. And at this point I said, "Actually, guys, look, the real reason I'm here is because I want to start bringing
cocaine into the country. I can bring to the table investment money, so we can upscale things,
bring more in at a time. I can get chemicals. I can just bring a lot to the table. You've obviously got
things going already." And it turned out that they were actually already bringing cocaine into the country, impregnating it in rubber, in latex. So, to me, it was almost
like destiny stepped in and brought about this meeting of minds. So, yeah, it was definitely
a pivotal point in my life. Well, that led me to here. The reason that they trusted me, I think, is because I was introduced
to them by my friend who knew one of their friends, and they trusted each other already. He vouched for me, they were vouched for. There were a couple of
occasions where I felt a little bit worried for my safety. I mean, on that very first trip, when I went out to Quito
to pick up that first tent, I wasn't sure whether there was
actually cocaine in the tent or whether I was just being
sent out there to be held and kidnapped and held for ransom. Basically, the guy sent a taxi for me, and the taxi took a really circuitous — took a route through
Quito all over the place to make sure it wasn't being followed. And we come to a petrol station,
I get out, the guy's there, the guy from Cali, and
he's a big ex-military guy, crew cut, typical-looking ex-military. So, he says, "Follow me." So we go to this gated compound. So, this big metal gate rolls back, we walk through, it rolls shut, and, I mean, it's about 8 foot high, so there's no getting out of there now. So I'm thinking, "Right,
well, I'm trapped already." Go up a set of steps, in
through a door. The door closes. I turn round, and
there's a gun hanging off the back of the door,
like a rifle or a shotgun or something long-barreled. So I thought, "Well,
that's not a good sign." So, we go into the flat, or apartment, and I thought, "Well, I better
check that the cocaine's in this tent because they
could just hand me a tent. I could fly all the way back to London and find this is just a normal tent." So I don't know there's cocaine in it. And he didn't speak much English, and I didn't speak much Spanish, so I said it in the best
sign language I could muster. "Is the cocaine in the tent?" So he said, "Yeah", and he's unrolled it. Sliced open a little
corner of the ground sheet and cut out a little piece of this latex and said, "Chew it." So I've chewed it, and it was
a bit like the old advert, "The man from Del Monte says yes"? But I couldn't say yes
because I couldn't talk because my mouth was so numb. So, I knew the cocaine was present, obviously because my
mouth had gone so numb. So, having rolled up the tent, I went back to the airport, and I realized that I
could trust these people. And from that point onwards, there was a good level of
trust between all of us. There was one occasion towards the end, after the Colombian had been
arrested and been released, and I had a sort of inkling that he was working for the police. So, we'd gone off to inspect what was going to be
the 100 kilos of cocaine that we were going to
convert into all these tents. And they had it in a safe
house in Buenaventura, which is on the Pacific coast of Colombia. Very dangerous city. We drive the old trafficking
route out of Cali, skirting the edge of the mountains. The guy from Cali is
showing me all the old, think it's where some of the
Cali cartel used to live, like the big houses
out in the countryside. One had a zoo, a bit like
Pablo Escobar had a zoo. All these huge houses with swimming pools, really nice places, just
out in the countryside. And we get to the safe house, go in the safe house, and straight away, there's a handgun on
the table, a revolver, and the two guys in the house, so I'm with my contact from Cali, and the two guys in the
house with the coke, and they get out a couple of kilos, but there's a handgun on the table, and there starts being a heated
conversation between them and the guy that I'm with. And I keep hearing, "MI5," "Police," and I start thinking, "Do
they think I'm MI5 or police?" And I've said, "Whoa, whoa, whoa." I had to say it in English. I said, "Look, I've just
come out of prison." I'm trying to do it by
sign language as well. I said, "Have you heard of
a prison called Parkhurst?" Because I was in Parkhurst for a while, and it's a renowned prison
on the Isle of Wight. And at this point, one of the
guys that's been gabbing away in Spanish and looking
like he's going to shoot me starts suddenly speaking English. Hasn't spoken a word of
English to this point. And he says, "Oh, I was in
prison in Britain as well. I was in The Verne." He happened to be in there at the same time as a friend of mine. Honestly, the coincidences
in my life have been crazy. It's such a small world. So I said, "Do you remember
a guy in there called Simon?" Blah-de-blah. And he said,
"Yeah, I remember Simon. I've got a photograph with him." And he goes off and he
pulls out his photo, and there's him with my friend. And of course, after that, they're like, "Yeah, yeah, this guy's sound.
We thought you were police. We thought you were MI5.
We were going to kill you. But now we know you're all good." So we could carry on
negotiating the business. And I was like, "Phew! That was close." Had I not been in prison
at any point in Britain and had that story and
happened to have had that friend in The Verne
at the same time as he was, well, I probably wouldn't be here today. But yeah, that was pretty scary. The end marketplace for our product tended to be South Wales, through our connection there, right across the M4 corridor. And the other would be Edinburgh. After getting the tent back
into Britain, or tents, we would have our lab set
up normally ready to go. The chemicals there to reduce various alcohols and acids to extract the cocaine. That would take two or three days to do. We'd then cut it and
repress it, repackage it. So, say we brought in 5 kilos. We'd normally end up with
probably 7 to 8 kilos of final product. Maybe we'd send 4 to South Wales, 4 or 5 to South Wales, and the rest up Scotland, or
maybe all of it to South Wales. Depended on what was happening. That would then be broken down into, I guess they would probably
sell a couple of kilos to people that were buying kilos. You know, it would just
get broken down into kilos, half kilos, 9 bars or 9 ounces, 4 ½s. And then obviously your
ounces would get broken down into grams and half grams, quarter ounces. So that's where that big pyramid came in. If you think 8 kilos, that's 8,000 grams. And that's before — because obviously, that's how
we give it to the dealers. They were then probably
cutting it in turn. In fact, I know they were. So, that 8,000 grams then
probably turned into, what, 10,000 or 12,000 grams? That's quite a lot of grams of cocaine that people are doing. I think it was about £60
or £70 a gram at that time. Nowadays, it's about £100. The money, I mean, sometimes I would drop the cocaine off and the person I was dropping it off to, my guy in South Wales, would give me a lump
of cash straight away. And then I'd say, "Look, just ring me when the rest of it's ready,
or I'll come and pick it up in incremental sections or payments." Obviously that would get
divided between the partners. So, really, you should get a third. Obviously, we'd have
to pay off our expenses like the passenger airfares, hotels, all of the costs, which is why we had an accountant,
to keep track of it all. To be honest, I remember
after the first trip, a lot of it for me wasn't about the money. It was about the planning and
the thought that goes into it and overcoming the Customs and Excise and the whole adrenaline and just the whole excitement of it all. A bit like a big game of chess, or poker for high stakes. Very addictive in that sense. In fact, I coined a phrase, "The selling of drugs is more addictive than the taking of drugs," which I think, for a lot of
people, it is, to some extent. And I remember after the first trip, having a holdall full of cash, like about a quarter of a million, and we were counting it
all, it took bloody ages, and we were sat there afterwards
with it all divided up into piles, you know, "That's yours, that's
yours, that's yours." And I was like, "Well, put that away. What's the next job?" Straight away, the same
day. "What's the next plan? When can we go again?" I was active up until
towards the end of 2005. I was active for about 2 ½, three years. Something like that. I finally got arrested. Things were going along kind of smoothly. Obviously there was the
bust at Crystal Palace, and that's when things
kind of started to unravel. I was left kind of in
charge of everything, and the Colombian partner, my Colombian partner in London, got flipped by the police,
became a police informant, got released after six months on remand, and obviously then started
feeding them information about what we were doing,
or what I was doing. But in the meantime, I'd
started at work with the chemist that we'd used to do the
extraction on the first tent. And I started to see the
surveillance happening around me, started to see the same
faces over and over again, cars, just obvious police surveillance. And then what really tipped the hat was I'd been introduced to a Pakistani guy through some fraudsters from London on a completely different matter, something to do with a big fraud. I mean, they were massive
in the fraud game, doing long firms, tax
evasion, stuff like that. And he said, "Well, I have a practice of getting a background check
done by a police-officer friend who's corrupt, who I pay
to do a background check on all the new people
that are introduced to me that I'm possibly going
to do some work with. So I had you checked." And the officer's quite
high ranking in the Met, or used to be. And he came back and said, there's this huge operation
all around you and six others, seven people in total, key members. I mean, we were really cautious
about surveillance anyway. We would do things like we
would change our telephones every two weeks, all of us,
the key members in the group. So we'd call it phone-change
day or something like that, and we'd literally all
go to a telephone shop, buy a new phone, new chip, new everything, discard the other one, destroy it, or give it to a homeless person. So if it was being monitored,
they would be led off, listening to some guy
talking about whatever. And we would exchange the
new numbers face to face. So we'd all meet up at a specific point and hand them over face to face and do this every two weeks for security. And to be honest, on the phones, we don't ever use them
to arrange a meeting. We wouldn't actually talk
about anything pertinent. So, we were really cautious on the phone. We knew of police tactics
and surveillance tactics. We wouldn't talk inside cars, we wouldn't talk inside
built-up environments, houses, flats, hotel
rooms, anywhere like that. So, if we were going to talk
about something important, I'd ring them up and I'd
say, "Meet me at X, Y, or Z." And normally we'd have
already set the next meeting. I'll say a time, but
it'll be an hour later or an hour earlier. So we'd already know which way to go. And we'd managed to get two
tents in on one occasion, and I'd set up a lab in Edinburgh, in an apartment up there through a friend. I'd said to the chemist — he was coming up to Edinburgh by train. I was already up there. I said, "Make sure you're not followed. Mate, whatever you do, make sure that the other
Colombian, [censored], doesn't know where you're
going or what you're doing." Unbeknownst to us, the
Colombian gets followed up with a friend of his
from London to Edinburgh, to the flat. So, we started work on the process, or processing and
extraction of the cocaine, and I didn't really want to
be around the lab too much whilst they were working,
so I left them to it, went off out to Edinburgh. And after a while I got a
phone call from the guy, and he said, "I think you
should come back because I think the place is under
surveillance by the police." I said, "I can get you
out. Both of you, now. But we have to leave. Leave everything. Leave all the drugs, leave the chemicals. Just leave everything and
let's just go, right now, and let's get the hell out of here." And they were like, "No, we're not sure. We don't want to lose the drugs." Blah, blah, blah. So, I said, "Well, that's
up to you, but I'm gone." I go across the road, get in the taxi, go off to a hotel for the night. Ring up the next morning, or
start trying to ring them. All the phones are off. The walkie-talkies that we
were using in close proximity, they were all dead. So I was like, well,
that's not a good sign. So, I get in a taxi or I walk back down to Leith, and what had been a big old Georgian front door, because it was a Georgian
flat, had been smashed through. Apparently, it took them half
an hour to get through it because it was so solid. And it was really big news in Scotland, because it was one of the first cocaine laboratories that they'd found. So, I disappeared down the
stairs as quick as I could. Drove out of Scotland, back down south, and knew that it would
probably take the forensics, the results to come back, maybe three to four weeks,
something like that. Got a Turkish friend who was
part of the Turkish Mafia to smuggle me out of Britain
in the boot of his Mercedes car because he was smuggling
alcohol and cigarettes in by the container load, as
well as possibly people. So, I phoned him up and I said, "Look, can you get me out of Britain?" And he said, "Yeah, just jump
in the boot of the Mercedes. I'll put some bags over you, and we'll just get the Hoverspeed," which is the quickest thing
over from Dover to Calais, "And you go on your merry way." So he brought an English car
over for me after a week or so, so I could get about. And I just disappeared
down to my dad's house to sort of wait things out. Decided to do one last job, and it was literally
going to be the last job. And the plan being that I
was going to rob this guy, this informant, get him
to organize the tent, the bag, obviously not let on
that I knew what was going on, get a mule out from
England, send the mule back, but he wasn't going to get the bag. I was going to send it elsewhere, get one of my friends to
extract it, keep the money, but obviously send the money to me. And I was going to disappear to Thailand for six months to a year and let the heat die down, hopefully. So, hadn't seen my girlfriend,
at this point, for months. So I said to her, "Why don't you come out to Ecuador as well and spend two weeks with me? I'm doing some business there." She didn't really know what. So, decided to do this one last job and fly out to Quito with KLM. Flew out to Quito, and as I land in Quito, there was a set of stairs
down to passport control, and at the bottom of those stairs was a woman with a clipboard,
and on that clipboard, she quite obviously had my picture, because she looked at the
clipboard, looked at me, did a double take, disappeared, and when I got to the
passport-control desk, there she was with a
senior officer, saying, "Oh, what're you doing here? Where are you going? Why?" And I hadn't been stopped at
all going in or out of Ecuador on any occasion before that. I just gave them all the
normal, "Oh, I'm on holiday." Blah, blah, blah. But really, I should've taken the warning as soon as I saw her and gone into Ecuador
and just disappeared. But I didn't because I thought,
"Well, we've done it before. I'm not carrying the bag back.
The mule's carrying it back." And the next day, my girlfriend
turns up from England. So I go and meet her at the
airport, get back to the hotel, go out for dinner in the hotel lobby. We finish dinner, a couple of drinks, and go to the reception, and I'd kind of befriended one of the receptionists by now, and she said to me, she looked me straight
in the eye and she said, "Have you been to the
Galápagos Islands this time?" And I said, "No," and I'd
never been on any trip before. And she said, "Well, you
really should go now, then." And obviously she was trying to warn me that the police were there. And having had a few drinks
and whatnot, I was like, didn't really take in what she was saying. My girlfriend was like, "I
want to go to the room." Didn't take on board what she was trying to tell me. Got in the elevator, up to
the fifth floor, or top floor, wherever it was, down the
corridor, key in the door, and as soon as the key went in the door, all hell broke loose. Ecuadorian police, plain clothes, bulletproof vests on, machine guns out, handguns out, balaclavas on. We go into the hotel room, they
go straight to the wardrobe, pull out the tent and go,
"Oh, look what we found." I immediately tried to bribe them. One of them spoke English, so I said, "Look, is there any other
way that we could do this?" I said, "I'll give you
25,000 or 30,000 euros, in cash, right now. You could keep the bag, so you've got a couple kilos
of coke in there, whatever. And if you give me a phone, I'll get you another 50,000 to
100,000 here within the hour, but you just have to let us go and pretend you didn't see us." And he said to me, "Oh, what
do you think we are? Corrupt? We're the Ecuadorian police force." To which I laughed, to be honest. But I guess because of the
British police being there in the background, that
their hands were tied, and they couldn't really do anything. I got transferred into the men's prison, which was called Garcia
Moreno, which was an old-style, almost like a Victorian English prison. There was a wing which
was mainly for foreigners. You could get anything
you wanted in there. It was almost like a small
town, contained within walls. The security was very lax. All the guards were,
well, not all the guards, but there were a lot of
guards who were very corrupt. So, if you had cash in there, you could buy a cell for about $2,000. End up buying a cell
after six months going by, because I could see I wasn't getting out in too much of a hurry. Have it all rewired, have it retiled. I've got a TV in there,
fridge, DVD, brand-new beds. Initially I didn't, because
I started bribing the judges, bribing police, trying to
get my way out of there, trying to lower the sentence,
because the British police had asked for the maximum
sentence of 25 years, and at that point, it would've
meant serving 23 out of 25. Every other weekend, you could
have your girlfriend over to stay the night, if you owned a cell. So you just kick out your cellmates. They slept in the gym. They
got locked in the wing gym. So, on that particular weekend, everybody would have a big party. There'd be loads of alcohol and drugs. Mainly cocaine in the prison, and weed. So, there'd be a huge party. There were shops in the
prison. There were restaurants. There was a hardware shop. It really was like a small town. During the daytime, you could
go from one wing to the other. So you could go and see your
friends on the other wings if you've paid the guard
a bribe of a dollar. Stuff like that. So, very corrupt. We actually set up a tour of the prison, and it became really popular. We'd have 15 to 20 tourists
come in every visit day. Show them around the prison.
Sometimes there were gunfights when the visitors were in there, so they'd all get rushed
out of the prison. But yeah, I mean, there were
firearms in there, machetes. Everybody had a machete. And when things got bad,
they got bad really quick. Hence the fact that a lot of
us were armed with handguns. After two years of being in Quito, I can see that my case is sort of just meandering on, not
really going anywhere. And my girlfriend's been
released by this point. Long gone back to Britain. So, I'm just left out
there on my own, basically. Thinking of all these different
ways of trying to escape. So, I've become friends
with some Colombians. They talked about blowing
the wall of the exercise yard with an RPG, because they
were FARC, members of FARC. So that was one plan. Another plan was a
helicopter lift off the roof of the prison, but it was
a little bit too expensive. It was, like, 80 grand, 100
grand. Something like that. Third was a tunnel. And because the prison was so old and so many people have escaped
out of there using tunnels, they said that it is literally like a rabbit warren
underneath this prison. They said if you open up a hole
and start digging a tunnel, you will come across at least two or three other tunnels in there. Like I say, forming friends
with these Colombians, members of FARC, and decide to try and escape, because we can see that the case is just going on and on and on. And they've had enough of
being in prison as well. So, we buy the penultimate cell on B wing, on the ground floor on the
right, which was virtually next door to the exterior
wall to the prison. I mean, the exterior wall
was a joke to that prison. It was maybe one, maximum
two, concrete blocks thick, and that was it, you were free. We'd buy the penultimate cell, stage a fake party with
loud music on the wing, break the floor, so we
smashed a hole in the floor, dug out the concrete, made a cap, because you could get concrete and cement and stuff in there if you wanted. So we made a cap to fit the hole and start digging this tunnel
out of the prison in Quito. But the guards got wind of the fact that I was planning some
sort of fuga masiva, as they called it in
Spanish, "massive escape." And after a little while, on a visit, they basically came and collected me with a piece of 2-by-4 in their hands, a piece of wood, and said, "Right, you're getting
moved to Guayaquil," which is the big port city
in the south of Ecuador. Very dangerous. And, I mean, this place was gigantic. I'd seen all sorts of
terrible things on the news about the prison at Guayaquil. At the time, it was either the fourth- or the fifth-most dangerous prison in the whole of South America. The murder rate there was
between five and six a week. 8,000 prisoners split half and half between two gangs who were
at war with each other. I end up in the end with the Cubanos. The other end were, at
the time, Los Rusos. Every day, gang fights. I mean, gunfights. They had inmates on the roof
of the prison, on the wings, one on each corner of each wing. There, they had control
of all the telephones. You weren't allowed a mobile
telephone in your possession. You had to use their mobile telephones. So you had to pay them a
dollar a minute to phone abroad or 30 cents locally, I think it was. They had, again, a pyramid organization where there were three brothers at the top called the Los Cubanos, the Cubanos. And below that, on each wing,
they had a boss on each wing, who collected a tax off every inmate once a week on a Sunday
of between $5 and $10, which was paid back to the
main bosses, or some of it was. And then they paid the
bribes to the guards, to the director of the prison, to let them carry on doing
what they were doing. Any foreigners that came into there were extorted for as much
as they could get from you. They would put a gun to your head, get you in a cell room, or in a room, and just say, "Phone your
family and get some money sent over to this person or that person via Western Union or MoneyGram." So, a lot of families were
going through a lot of hell. A lot of foreigners as well. Into this mix of these two gangs at war with each other comes a third gang called the Choneros, who are now one of
Ecuador's biggest gangs. And they end up on the wing that I'm on, about 10 to 15 of them, including Jose [Jorge] Luis Zambrano, who was the head of the — he was the boss of the
Choneros at the time. And I actually got on
quite well with this bunch, the Choneros, because
they were better educated. They were nicer people, even though they were contract killers. They were generally nicer people. Just easier to get on with. At one point, they put me in
charge of selling their cocaine on the wing for them. So, I'm now the boss of the
cocaine on that wing. As well as having a boss on each wing, they had a boss for
each drug on each wing. So there was a boss of the cocaine, boss of the marijuana, or weed, and a boss of the crack, or pulver, which is what they smoked. You could wander from wing to wing, but they would lock you on your wing. You had to be back on your wing by 5 p.m. So, they would lock you
on your wing at 5 p.m. Now, with this third gang, the Choneros coming into the prison, it destabilized the whole
dynamics of the prison and the power structure. So, this gang, the Cubanos
didn't really like the fact that there was this
new-boys-on-the-block sort of thing. And they started to become
very powerful very quickly, the Choneros, because they
were already an up-and-coming, very powerful gang anyway. This gang, the Choneros,
they were kind of used by politicians and people
to clean up other gangs and shoot opposition politician members. They were sort of hired guns, assassins. And at the time, Rafael
Correa had just been elected, so things were getting so
dangerous in the prisons anyway, he had a whole new prison estate built. There was a massive shootout one night, in which I nearly got killed. Two-hour-long gun battle between the Choneros and the Cubanos on the wing that I was on. At that time, the Sinaloa
cartel was starting to make inroads into Ecuador. They were already trafficking
with some of the gangs, particularly the Choneros. Zambrano manages to get all
the gangs working together, working with the Sinaloa cartel, and it's all going quite well. He then gets released,
he's out six months, gets killed by a Colombian hitman. Shot dead in a café. Fito took over, started
running the gang in the prison. The Choneros. Now, in the meantime, as
well as the Sinaloa cartel, you start getting, the New Generation Jalisco
cartel start making inroads. So there's now a power struggle between the Sinaloa and the
New Generation Jalisco cartel over who controls the trafficking
routes out of Ecuador, particularly that port city, Guayaquil. There's a lot of big megalabs producing tons and tons of cocaine along the borders of both
Colombia and Ecuador, and Peru and Ecuador, and in the Amazon. And it's just huge business,
but it's also led to huge instability in
Ecuador and mass killings. At the tail end of last year, there was some really bad prison massacres, infighting between these gangs. I mean, just the most horrific, barbaric, medieval warfare you can believe. Just absolutely horrific, horrific stuff. The Cubanos kind of got wiped out. I'm glad I wasn't there when it happened, because I'd probably be dead by now. So, that all happened. And the authorities managed to get control of the situation again. But in the meantime, there's been a new president-elect
called Daniel Noboa. Listening to his accent,
he was educated in America, because he sounds kind of Americanized. Has declared war on the gangs in Ecuador and has basically said
that they're in a state of internal warfare. And if you remember what
happened in the Philippines when Duterte just basically declared war on the drug gangs there, or drug users as well,
and killed something like nearly 20,000 people, I think it was. So I think that's kind of the
way Ecuador is about to go, and that's going to lead to
a hell of a lot more deaths. The cocaine trade has been
around for a hell of a long time. I mean, the Dutch were some of the first to make it really popular. It was legally sold, wasn't it? But that was in, what, the
mid-1800s or something. It was going into drinks like Coca-Cola. Hence the name, Coca-Cola. And obviously, it's become used for a multitude of anesthetics, like lidocaine, novocaine, and benzocaine. Anything that ended in "-caine" has come from cocaine, basically. Pretty much. I think it was sort of semi-legal
at that point, wasn't it? You could buy cocaine from the pharmacist. Obviously, then it becomes prohibited. The cartels really came to power when cocaine became super popular. In America, really, was the
beginning of it, I think. The early '70s, I mean,
you've got the Italian Mafia starting to bring in cocaine into America. I think through the '70s, really, mainly, with the Medellín and Cali cartel being the two main ones, kicking it off, going up to
Miami, boatloads going in. I mean, everybody's seen "Scarface." I mean, it's not that far from the truth. I think cocaine was certainly viewed as a glamorous drug, particularly in the
'70s and '80s and '90s. You know, pop stars and models and people that had a lot
of money used cocaine, because it was quite expensive back then in a lot of places. As the market has become
more and more saturated with greater and greater volumes of cocaine being produced, the price has dropped. It goes up and down like the stock market, depending on how much is
available and what's happening. You've got the internet, which is obviously quite a big base that can be used for selling drugs. Postal services are a lot
faster, courier services. All the mechanisms involved
with the cocaine trade are all getting faster and bigger. So it's just ever-expanding, really. In my opinion, the cocaine trade
is bigger than it ever was. From the days when I
was trafficking cocaine, the cocaine, in the way it was made, using ether and certain chemicals that are now very much prohibited, it was definitely of a
higher quality back then and a lot stronger. I think nowadays, they're, A, they're cutting it at source. I think, overall, the quality
of cocaine has diminished. The volumes of cocaine have increased. So I think it's either been cut — right, it's partly to
do with the chemicals needed to manufacture it
being harder to source. The volumes of chemicals
you need are huge. A lot of the chemicals in South America that were being previously
used to make cocaine that were the ideal
chemicals to make it with became highly controlled. More controlled, maybe less produced. But, I mean, they got
around that by finding similar chemicals of a similar nature, just using something that was as close as. But of course, the end
product is not the same. It's slightly different, with every different
chemical that you change. So I would say that overall
the quality of cocaine has gone down over the years. It's definitely not as strong as it was. When you're talking about
making tons of cocaine, you're talking about, if
you're using ether for 1 kilo, I think it's between 5
and 7 liters of ether, just to make 1 kilo of cocaine. Let alone the sulfuric acid,
the hydrochloric acid you need. Potassium permanganate. All the rest of the chemicals involved that are becoming harder to get. Acetone. In countries where
they're producing cocaine, even being stopped with
some of those chemicals will land you in prison because
they know what they're for or what they're likely to be for, if you're being caught with them. So, yeah, at street
level, I would say that as cocaine has become
more readily available, there's certainly more
people are using it. It's easier to get. The Albanians have had a massive influence in the cocaine market in Britain. They now control a lot of the trade. They've become very efficient
at the way they deliver it. I mean, you can pick up the phone, and it's like getting — in fact, you can get cocaine quicker than you can get a pizza delivered. I think it's still quite
a big cash business, for sure. Definitely. And I think it always
will be, if it's illegal, but there's definitely bitcoin, cryptocurrencies have
definitely become involved, to a certain degree. Bank-to-bank transfers. Even things like using big
multinational companies. Say you've got somebody on the inside to make a transfer from
one country to another. I mean, I think it's just still quite a few of the old
ways of money laundering, just setting up a business and cleaning it through a business, through property, through
high-value goods, basically. Watches, cars. High-value products that can be bought, or, I don't know, or through corrupt bank
officials that will accept cash. I mean, there's various
ways of cleaning up money. If it's going in the skirting boards, behind the skirting
boards, under false floors. Some of it, we were putting — we did have means of ways of
getting it into cleaning it. We were able to buy whole
properties with cash through corrupt property dealers. We could buy a house with cash and they would give us all the paperwork. Stocks and shares was a good one, I found. Slowly put money into a bank account and then buy a load of
shares, and then we could use the share certificates as collateral. Artwork, antiques. Buy them. Sell them again straight away. Stuff like that. Just to clean the money. As far as the war on drugs goes, I would say it's unwinnable. And really, the only way
to get a grip on things, a hold on things, is to legalize it, manufacture it under
license, tax it heavily, distribute it from controlled
distribution points, offset the ill effects on healthcare through taxation. I'm not sure there's much
that the government can do to stop cocaine being trafficked.
I think it will always — I mean, the legalization
question is a tricky one because, I mean, we've seen
certain drugs legalized in America in certain states, Canada, and in some respects, it's
worked; in others, it hasn't. The problem is that there
are always going to be people that abuse drugs, that
don't just use drugs. The same as people abuse or use alcohol, or any drug. You could even say chocolate. There's always going to be a
problem element with drugs. It's just having the best
control over it that you can and just trying to offset, and keep a grip on the ill effect of it as much as you can. In a previous interview, I
mentioned that, to some extent, it's almost better for
governments if drugs are illegal, because it maintains — if you think about the amount of money that goes into the judiciary,
i.e., the police force, catching drug dealers, prosecuting them. You've got the prison service and all the ancillary services
that service prisoners, like food, utilities, just everything. I mean,
it's huge business. Prison officers' jobs. I mean, when you start
looking into how much it costs to keep people in prison
per year per prisoner, it's a lot of money. It is big business, it being illegal. It would be interesting to do the maths and see how it would work out if it was legal and taxed, which would be more or less profitable. And I bet you it would be less
profitable if it was legal. I bet you any money. So, I was 4 years old, and I accidentally got
fed a lump of hash cake by my mum, unbeknownst to her. They were at a party. My
dad used to smoke hash. He was a builder, so there was
always hash around the house. Obviously being a kid, I didn't
realize what was going on. Didn't appreciate what was happening. But he was smoking it daily. And we were at this particular
party, and my mum fed me a lump of what I thought
was chocolate cake, and it was actually laced
with a lot of hashish, and I got really stoned. But then real involvement came
after my parents got divorced when I was about 10. My mom got together with
one of my dad's friends, who had two older sons, the oldest of which was
a well-known local DJ. And they were organized in a lot of illegal raves at the time. This is early '90s. So obviously, I want to start going along. Start tagging along. See, it's really easy to
sell drugs in these parties, because the police aren't
getting involved whatsoever. So they feel quite safe, quite easy to do. Most of the people I'm
selling to, I know anyway. So it was an easy way to generate money. So, that was all the party stuff, and then the cocaine came a
bit later, when I was at uni. I met local dealers around Cardiff. They then started asking
for much larger amounts. The local dealer I'd been
introduced to in my hometown didn't want to get involved, so introduced me to the
next guy up the ladder, who was the key link to
[Brian Brendan] Wright, who was bringing the coke in. I did pack it in, and I got out and started a painting
and decorating business because my dad was a builder, and he said, "Look, you can have all
the painting and decorating contracts on the back of
the building work that I do, as long as the client agrees." It was just hard work,
which I wasn't used to. I was used to making
10, 20 grand in an hour flipping a few kilos of coke, and trying to adjust to earning, what, 600, 700 quid a week? It was pretty difficult. Started dabbling with cocaine
again on the weekends. I think that's what it was, partly. A lot of friends kept
ringing me up, saying, "Oh, do you want to be involved in this? Can you get us that?" Kept getting hassled to
become involved again, and in the end, just gave up. Yeah, I mean, not blowing
my own trumpet, but, I mean, I am reasonably intelligent. I like politics and news quite
a lot, so I follow trends. I follow the news. I've always followed the
stock market a little bit. Particularly pharmaceuticals. I've always been interested in that sort of side of life. I suppose growing up
with it all around me, it always interested me, all the sort of side of mysticism, and I've loved history and archeology. So, people have been
taking mind-altering drugs ever since we were created. Particularly on the Ecuador thing, I always tried to maintain control and not take too many of the
drugs that we were selling, or I was selling, because, I mean, if you start getting out
of control, things start going wrong and you don't
know what you're doing, you're taking too many risks. So, yeah, I tended to sort of keep it fairly straight. Ish. So, I was finally released in 2015 in Britain, out of Wandsworth. After being captured in Ecuador, I spent nine years and
three months there, I think. I did 10 years, 10 days in total on that sentence. I'd already done about three, well, about 2 ½ on the previous one. So, that's a great big chunk of life. If I could rewind time, I would probably not do it again. You know, if there'd been more
money around when I was a kid I wouldn't have been inclined
to become involved with drugs. If I hadn't have been
brought up around parents that were using drugs, I'd
probably have been less inclined to become involved with drugs. If the whole illegal rave
scene hadn't happened. There was just so many things in my life that led me to this point. I mean, I wouldn't say
I was very influential. I mean, 3 to 5 kilos of coke, to me, is not that influential. I mean, I know underneath, when the police explained how
many people were involved, how many people were taking
those drugs we were bringing in, that sort of made me sit back
a bit and think, "God, yeah. We were influencing quite
a lot of people's lives." I mean, in my eyes, I never thought of myself as being a gangster or a kingpin. I see those as being
people that are involved in bringing in tons at a time. The overall picture? I was a
minnow in a great big ocean. Yeah. I don't know. Any kids thinking about
getting involved, don't. Because it will ruin your life. It might seem appealing at the time, and it might seem like a good idea and an easy way to generate
money, but trust me, it's not an easy way to generate money. It is really difficult
and it's really dangerous, and it will have life-changing consequences, eventually. You'll either end up dead,
in prison, or just f---ed. Sorry to use my French, but yeah. I reflect back on my time as a trafficker as being extremely hard work, stressful, caused a lot of trouble. Not just for me, but for a lot of people
around me and my family. So, obviously I learned
to paint and decorate when I was in prison at
Gloucester, which was useful, because it gave me a trade,
and I think they should do that a lot more in prisons these days. I know they've cut a lot of
those sorts of training courses, but I think a lot of people
in prison in Britain today could do with more of that,
and that's what I do now. I'm painting and decorating. I hand-paint extremely
expensive hand-fitted kitchens. So, if anybody needs one repainted, you can always look me up. But yeah, I paint houses as well. Paint anything, basically. Still trying to write the
prequel to the first book, "El Infierno," which is
published by Ebury Penguin, but I'm about a third to
a halfway through that, but it's finding the time to do it. The prequel is basically going to run from when I was arrested around the time I went into the prison in Gloucester up until I get arrested in Ecuador, because there's some crazy stories that I can tell you during that period, living in Bristol and just
getting up to all sorts of stuff. Car chases, gunfights. Some of it quite funny. Something like "Lock, Stock
and Two Smoking Barrels," if you can imagine that in Bristol. Bansky was just coming out
when I was living there. He was just starting off. I remember seeing some of his artwork sprayed up on derelict buildings. And people saying, "Oh, there's this new
graffiti artist around." I wish I kept some of his work.
It'd be worth millions now. We could've avoided selling any drugs and just sold Banksys.
