Gangs (35 page)

With the courier business under control, Michael turned his attention to finding new and better ways to smuggle drugs. Green put him in touch with a man called Richard Hannigan, who claimed to have a foolproof method of bringing cannabis into the UK. The drugs would be placed in blue barrels, which would be hidden inside tankers carrying paraffin wax or other products. The paraffin wax would hide any odour from the drugs and, because the tanker still appeared to be full, there was nothing to draw any suspicion. Hannigan’s claims proved to be right on the money. Of the twenty-one cannabis-laden tankers that came into the UK, only one was ever discovered.

Michael didn’t stop there. He hatched a plan with a gang based in Spain to buy a typical tourist bus and build in a secret drug-carrying compartment. The coach would be filled with tourists and even have a guide. It would be the perfect cover. As regular shipments of cannabis with the coach began, Michael dubbed it the ‘fun bus’.

Michael made money from all aspects of his business with Green but most of his wealth came from the money-laundering. He would charge between one and five per cent of the total amount laundered to hand the money back to the European dealers. Within months he had become a millionaire many times over.

Carpenter observed his promise to keep away the police and was rewarded accordingly. At least once a week he would arrive at the house in Radlett and Michael would hand over up to £10,000 in cash. The money would be brought down from the loft where Michael kept a cash stash of between £30,000 and £1 million. In all, Carpenter is said to have received more than £250,000. However, he has never been convicted.

Michael lied to everyone in order to keep his laundering business working. To his friends, his couriers, even members of his own family. Even the NatWest bank was taken in. When the money-laundering scam got too big for their own
bureau de change,
Housam Ali struck a deal with one in the Lebanon, where he already had an account.

Ali would phone through an order to Beirut for batches of foreign currency and then Michael would meet the courier at an airport or hotel to swap the foreign notes for the sterling he had received from drug deals. The couriers would deposit the money at a London branch of NatWest as if it had come directly from Beirut. It meant that, to all intents and purposes, the money seemed to be coming from a legitimate source.

At one point a manager at NatWest raised questions about why some of the cash coming from Ali did not resemble the rest that was coming from the Lebanese
bureau de change.
Michael reacted by importing the same wrappings used by the Lebanese office to wrap his own cash. The questions stopped.

A few weeks later Customs officers detained some couriers carrying cash from Beirut on Michael’s behalf. But he had done such a good job of convincing NatWest that the money was legitimate that the bank itself intervened and reassured Customs that there was no problem.

Between January 1997 and April 1998, Ali and Michael successfully laundered £28.2 million through NatWest right under the bank’s nose. The bank had done nothing wrong. It had followed its own rules and regulations and made genuine efforts to check the source of the cash.

Michael was living in style. He celebrated his fortieth birthday by hiring a ballroom at the Dorchester. Fifty guests toasted his health and happiness with seemingly endless supplies of vintage champagne and fine wines. The highlight of the evening was the unveiling of a cake made to reflect Michael’s lifestyle: alongside a bright red ‘40’ were icing-sugar copies of the three mobile phones he always carried, his silver Porsche, the stacks of fifty-pound notes that bulged in his wallet and the Silk Cut cigarettes he constantly smoked. ‘Michael loved it, and we all thought it was a great joke at the time,’ says Tracy Kirby, ‘but looking back you feel a bit stupid for not having worked out what was really going on.’

Operation Draft began on 23 January 1998 when officers from Customs and Excise began a routine investigation into the Hatfield industrial warehouse unit after receiving a tip-off that it was being used to store drugs. Within a few days they had identified Michael Michael as the principal mover behind the organisation and placed him and all his associates under close surveillance. For four months they watched as tankers, tourist buses and cars, all laden with drugs, moved in and out of the unit. They saw Michael meeting with some of the biggest names in organised crime and then, to their horror, with DC Carpenter.

They listened in on telephone calls, planted bugs in hotel rooms (at one point catching Michael with his lover) and recorded the comings and goings of more than a hundred people. They filmed and photographed Tracy and other couriers making their way to and from the continent with their bundles of cash and they identified Michael’s suppliers in France, Amsterdam, Ireland and Spain.

The knock took place on 25 April. Dozens of Customs officers surrounded the house at Radlett and moved in to arrest the main man. Michael, out of his head on coke, believed he was being robbed by rivals and grabbed a loaded gun, pointing it at the first man in through his door. Only when the intruder identified himself as a Customs officer did he drop the weapon and give himself up.

Inside Michael’s house, the investigators were staggered at what they found. It wasn’t the £800,000 in cash or the original paintings worth £1 million hanging on the walls. It was the fact that, like a good bookkeeper, Michael had kept precise and detailed records of every drug transaction he had ever taken part in. The paperwork told who had bought what and how much they had paid. It listed each courier, where they had travelled to and how much money had been taken. It listed cash due from drugs sales across the country and who owed what. ‘We had absolutely everything,’ said one Customs officer, ‘all the evidence we could ever want.’

For a short while Michael said nothing except that he was glad it was all over. The strain of living a double life was starting to get to him. He had been telling so many lies to so many people that he could no longer separate fact from fiction. He believed that, at any moment, Paul Carpenter would walk through the door and apologise and that he would get the chance to give up the life of an informant. After all, that was exactly what he had been paying him for.

Then he was told that Carpenter had been arrested. Furthermore, he was told that whatever arrangement he might have had with the police (at the time Customs were unaware of the allegations of corruption that would later surface), it did not cut any ice with Customs. He was the head of a major drugs gang and that was all there was to it.

And that was when Michael decided to talk to customs. And talk and talk and talk. During the course of 250 taped interviews Michael told customs absolutely everything. He told them about the suppliers, the traffickers, the smugglers, the money-launderers, and the ‘money mules’. Most of all he told them about the money he had paid Carpenter and the information he had received in return.

‘Even to my family I have had to tell lies and be deceitful,’ he said, in one of these many interviews. ‘I have become a polished liar. There were occasions when I informed on my family. Because of my statements my friends, my family and my lover are all awaiting trial. It is part of the business of informing and dealing – being disloyal goes with the territory.’

During a series of trials lasting for more than two years Michael gave evidence against everyone he had ever worked for and with, including Lynn and his mother. His testimony resulted in more than thirty convictions, though the operation failed to snare any of the bigger fish. Green was arrested and held for extradition, but charges against him were dropped and he remains a free man.

Although Michael is said personally to have made more than £58 million from his money-laundering and drugs-smuggling operation, the courts ordered him to repay just £69,000. He, Lynn and their children now live under new names courtesy of the witness-protection programme. The contract on Michael’s head is said to be worth £4 million.

Operation Draft helped uncover the fact that vast sums of money were being smuggled out of the country by couriers to pay for drugs and led to a massive crackdown by Customs. Ports and airports are now patrolled by specially trained sniffer dogs who detect stacks of currency instead of drugs.

Since then huge sums of cash have been found concealed in hollowed-out shoes, electrical goods, bicycle tyres, nappies and specially constructed body-suits. A woman leaving Heathrow airport hid £418,000 in boxes of Persil washing powder.

Although there are no limits on what quantities of cash can be brought in or taken out of the country, Customs officers have the power to seize amounts greater than £10,000 if the owner cannot explain its origin and there are suspected drugs-trade links.

‘Everyone we stop has the option of staying and convincing us that the money is legitimate, or simply continuing on their way,’ says one Customs officer. ‘More than ninety per cent leave the money. In many cases we never hear from them again. The only thing they make sure they have is a letter from us stating the money has been seized. That way they won’t get into trouble with the people who have employed them.’

The best estimates suggest that at least £1 billion is smuggled out of Britain each year. The couriers travel to countries all over the world but one country stands out as being something of a magnet for the trade: Turkey.

A survey of flights leaving London for Istanbul discovered more than £150 million in cash being flown out in just three months. Customs officers and senior detectives alike believe the money was destined to pay for supplies of a hugely popular and highly addictive drug, which, despite the rise of crack and cocaine, is still regarded by many as the most dangerous substance in the world.

 

It was just before four p.m. on Saturday 22 June 2002 and I was sitting at my desk at the
Observer
waiting patiently for it to get close enough to six o’clock for me to leave without being too conspicuous.

I’d spent the morning putting the finishing touches to a story about a 200 per cent rise in crack-cocaine seizures across Britain and, apart from keeping an eye on the breaking news bulletins to ensure I didn’t miss anything, had little else to do.

For most of the day the office had been alive with World Cup fever but, not much of a sports fan, I’d paid little attention to that day’s game between Turkey and Senegal. Then the paper’s news editor, Andy, appeared at the side of my desk and suggested that, as Turkey had won, I should take a trip to Green Lanes in north London and write a small piece about the victory celebrations.

Anxious to finish work at a reasonable hour I tried to point out that, notwithstanding my lack of knowledge about the beautiful game, this hardly fitted in with my usual line of work. Andy was having none of it. ‘I wouldn’t be so sure,’ he told me, in his soft Scottish tones. ‘Some of the decisions that ref made  . . . I’d say they were pretty criminal.’

Green Lanes stretches from the edge of Bush Hill Park to Stoke Newington but a single one-mile section, from Turnpike Lane to Manor House, has become famous as the business and cultural centre of Britain’s Turkish, Kurdish and Cypriot community.

Both sides of the street are lined with cafés and clubs, foreign banks and shops selling a wide variety of specialist foodstuffs and supplies. Everywhere there are signs and posters in Turkish and Kurdish and many residents consider the area a little piece of home.

I arrived at the corner of Finsbury Park just as a massive victory parade was setting off and spent the next hour joining the flag-waving crowd as they cheered, sang and stopped traffic to share the good news. The atmosphere was straight out of a carnival and I carried out dozens of interviews, filling my notebook with multiple exclamations of joy from the ecstatic fans and predictions of victory against Turkey’s next opponents – Brazil.

The atmosphere was jolly and carnival-like, but as the section of crowd I was moving with passed a small grocery store, words were exchanged and all hell broke loose. Weapons, including knives, cricket bats and staves of wood, were produced and a mass brawl developed.

I watched, horrified, as one man, armed with a thick piece of wood, used it to batter another to the floor, leaving his face a bloody pulp. Across the road from me two other men were having a heated argument. When the taller of the two tried to throw a punch I saw the smaller man draw a large knife from his belt and lunge forward. The tip of the blade only just missed his opponent’s belly. As the crowd around me gasped, the taller man used his long legs to turn and run like hell.

All around me the crowd fought viciously, running back and forth in waves of spectacular attacks. Outnumbered, the men in the grocery shop retreated and used their own produce as weapons, throwing whole melons and potatoes as the crowd surged forward around them. This only made things worse: the mob surged forward and smashed the shop display to smithereens as the owners cowered inside behind a flimsy wooden door.

Then, from nowhere, reinforcements seemed to arrive and the crowd gathered around the shop found themselves caught in the middle of a brutal melee. The fighting continued until more than fifty police officers arrived in riot gear and acted as a human barrier in order to keep the warring sides apart.

The scene I had witnessed had left me shocked and speechless. I tried to speak to a few locals and find out more about what had prompted the battle but the answers I received were conflicting and confused. All I could discern was that the shop-owners were Kurds and that several members of the Turkish procession said they had overheard an insult as they went past.

I eventually filed my report on the celebrations and made only passing mention of the riots – it seemed inappropriate to tarnish all my coverage of the Turkish triumph with a report of what, despite its scale and ferocity, seemed a relatively isolated incident. In fact, it was a chilling taste of things to come.