MORE MINDER THAN HOLLYWOOD

The drugs business is controlled not by Jamaicans, Chinese or other
immigrant gangs, but by white, middle-aged career criminals who run
their operations in ways that any businessman would recognise

FOR film, fiction and sensational journalism, the idea of an
invasion of exotic drugs gangs is irresistible. Occasional drive-by
shootings involving Jamaican Yardies with noms de guerre such as Thin
Hand Barry and Juggernaught help bolster the myth that foreigners-not
just Yardies, but also Chinese Triad gangsters and the Russian
mafia-are spreading a culture of drugs and violence in Britain. But
the truth has less in common with bullet-riddled Hollywood films than
it has with "Minder", the classic television portrayal of the seedy
world of middle-aged London criminals.

According to the policemen charged with eliminating the trade, around
80% of the illegal drugs in this country are sold by operations run by
indigenous career criminals, many of them in their fifties and
sixties. They have business relationships in mainland Europe,
particularly the Netherlands, where many of their supplies come from,
with Triad groups like the 14K and Wo Shing Wo, with Colombian
cartels, Turkish heroin merchants and Kosovan networks. But they
themselves are as white and middle-aged as were Ronnie and Reggie Kray.

Customs officers refer to these people as "traditional faces". They
are the men who swamped Britain with fresh supplies of high-grade
ecstasy in the final months of 1999. They ordered the UKP 1.2
billion-worth ($1.8 billion) of heroin and cocaine seized by Customs
and Excise in 1999-2000, and are currently working to establish
cocaine as the club drug of choice in 2001.

For a brief moment in the late 1980s and early 1990s ecstasy broke
this mould. With the new product came new suppliers. Gangs of former
football hooligans and Dutch criminal entrepreneurs set themselves up
importing and distributing this club drug.

But since then the drugs business, like so many others, has
consolidated. The old gangs proved more efficient than the newcomers.
They import ecstasy as part of mixed consignments which Customs and
Excise calls "cocktail loads". A recent seizure at Dover, for
instance, included cannabis, ecstasy, cocaine, heroin and amphetamine
sulphate.

The men who run the drugs trade tend to operate diversified criminal
syndicates for whom drugs are only one part of their business.
According to the National Criminal Intelligence Service, these gangs
are often active in armed robbery, fraud and the vast trade in illegal
cigarettes. Diversification allows them to use their resources
efficiently: the same networks of people and lorries can be employed
in the import of either tobacco or class A drugs.

There are exceptions. Sometimes a redundant steelworker who used his
pay-off to buy a yacht on the Solent or the Clyde Estuary has a go at
importing cannabis from Morocco. Freelance heroin and cocaine dealers
swallow relatively small quantities of drugs in condoms or rubber gloves.

But freelancers find it hard to break into the business, because the
professionals in Easterhouse in Glasgow and Peckham in London like to
deal with people they know. Drug dealing, like banking, is a
relationship business-only more so, because the risks of dealing with
strangers are that much greater.

For the police, the freelancers are relatively easy meat. The
trouble with the serious operators is that they do not stand out. They
are cautious businessmen who shun the riskier end of the trade and as
a result are rarely prosecuted.

Detective Sergeant Kenneth Simpson of the Strathclyde police's drugs
squad knows the type of man he is looking for. His house is in
Bearsden, Milngavie or Newton Mearns, one of the fashionable suburbs
to which prosperous Glaswegians aspire. It is double-glazed and done
out with chandeliers and luxury bathrooms. The bins contain receipts
for cash transactions at Versace, and Dolce and Gabbana. The children
are at private schools in the West End and the wife has a four-wheel
drive.

In Glasgow, says Mr Simpson, a premier-league dealer is relatively
parochial. "He aspires to everything money can buy but he does not
lead a huge gang. He might portray himself as a car dealer or the boss
of a taxi firm." The drugs entrepreneurs tend to have neither fat bank
accounts nor conventional share portfolios, though there may be stakes
in pubs, clubs and other businesses well suited to laundering cash.

Eddie Gray, a Liverpool man who is now a category A prisoner at Full
Sutton prison in York, is a fine example of the type, and one of the
few to have been jailed recently. Mr Gray was convicted last year of
conspiracy to supply heroin and ecstasy. He told the police that his
Ferrari and luxury home with heated indoor swimming pool were the
fruits of his modest taxi business. Investigating officers hope to
seize the car, house and a fine collection of designer jewels at a
hearing this spring.

Drugs entrepreneurs avoid trouble by running relatively small,
streamlined operations. The workforce is a few reliable mules. Every
month or so a pair will be despatched to meet established contacts in
Manchester or Liverpool. There they split. One will collect ten or
more kilos of refined Turkish or Afghan heroin-for which the boss will
pay UKP 15,000-17,000 a kilo-and perhaps a similar quantity of cocaine.

Violence, like distribution, is outsourced. If a street-dealer who has
failed to pay for his supply needs to be disciplined, or an upstart
rival frightened, the job will be done by what the Glasgow gangs call
a "fire-in" or "rocket". Elsewhere, only the slang is different. A
desperate addict or debtor will be supplied with drugs or cash in
return for a one-off act of intimidation or thuggery. He is a supply
hooligan, acting out of desperation not loyalty. He is not one of the
inner circle, and does not know where his orders came from.

Glasgow has six or eight of these big buyers and about two dozen
first-division dealers. They grew up in the slums of the East End or
the peripheral estates erected on the city's western fringes and still
fit in among the people they left behind. They each control a
relatively small area of the city and are cautiously aware that the
worst thing a career criminal can do is to get greedy.

In London, Bristol, Liverpool and Manchester, the trade operates in a
similar way. The criminal "parishes" may be slightly larger. There are
more direct connections between London gangs and their foreign
suppliers. But Britain's big buyers know each other, trade with each
other and try to avoid stepping on each others' toes.

Like many of those in the consumer-goods business, the men who run the
drugs trade are keen to encourage their customers to buy higher-value
products. Cocaine, until recently the narcotic of the fairly rich, is
spreading through the clubs. Like heroin-and unlike lower-value drugs
such as ec-stasy and marijuana-cocaine offers huge returns from small
consignments. If Britain's drugs entrepreneurs prove as adept at
creating demand as they are at controlling supply, the cocaine boom
will pay for several new taxi firms and car dealerships in Essex and
Lanarkshire this year.