Jade, a beautiful German girl, eighteen years of age, arrived at Harwich from the Hook of Holland. She was to become the centre of my first cocaine case. She was pulled by the bench staff as Intelligence had discovered that she was travelling on a cash-paid, one-way ticket. Within ten minutes of being stopped and questioned, she broke down and admitted that she was carrying cocaine. She was taken to a cell and strip searched; she was wearing a bodysuit (very much the same design as the body armour that you see the police wear), which contained fifteen kilos of pure Colombian nose sherbet.
I got the phone call ten minutes later as I was the duty officer on that week, and I was at Harwich within half an hour. With the capture of a smuggler, the investigation service swung into a fast and well-tested routine. While I was driving to the port, my senior officer was making available as many investigators as he could. The reason for this was to enable what we used to call a ‘live run’. This meant we would get the smuggler’s agreement to carry on with their delivery instructions but under the tight control and surveillance of ourselves. Historically, this had produced amazing results with some of the UK’s greatest drugs hauls and arrests. Sometimes you had to follow the rabbit down the hole to get to Wonderland.
If I was quick enough and if she agreed, we could get the operation moving within thirty minutes. But I found out the trouble with the plan when I got there: the young woman, Jade, was petrified. She really didn’t want to go through with it, she said, as her boyfriend and his mates would kill her. It was hard not to feel a little sorry for her because she was clearly both naive and bullied. I gave her the standard answer: ‘Don’t worry, there are more of us than them and we will look after you.’ This just made her burst into tears again.
‘No, they are Yardies! They carry lots of guns and knives. They don’t mess!’ she said.
She had a point. Yardies, indeed, ‘don’t mess’ – meaning that, when it comes to settling scores, they aren’t shy. I gave Bob, my senior officer, a call on his mobile to update him. Jade was not going to play but she had told me her instructions and I thought we might be in luck. I explained the situation and its background.
Apparently, six months earlier, Jade’s friend had taken her to a club on Reeperbahn in Hamburg. There she had met the owner of the club, a British guy who had been in the Army and decided to stay in Germany at the end of his service. He and Jade got on well, although at forty-five he was much older than her. They made a strange couple but Jade, being young and impressed by the guy’s money, fell for him. The guy’s name was Nevin Bull and, as we found out later, Jade was just one of many whom Bull had got close to – most were now prostitutes working in his club.
But it seemed that luck was on Jade’s side, in some perverse way. They stayed as a couple for a few months and Bull asked her to go on holiday with him to Jamaica. She said she agreed immediately as she had never been abroad before and her family had roots in Jamaica. But, once there, Bull totally changed. He would leave her locked in her hotel room for days as he left her to ‘go do business’. Then, when he did take her out, it was to a Yardie club where she was paraded nude in front of Bull’s associates. Some of them had tried to rape her but she had managed to fight them off. Bull, she said, never batted an eye. In the last few days of the holiday, Bull took her to another hotel where they were to meet what he called ‘the tailor’. Thinking that Bull was going to buy her a new dress, she was willingly measured and the tailor left, telling Bull that it would be ready in two days. Five minutes later, four Yardie gang members arrived at the hotel room and she was locked in the bathroom as Nevin and the men discussed something that Jade couldn’t hear.
After the four left, Bull unlocked the bathroom door and led Jade into the bedroom where he told her his tale of woe. His club was losing money hand over fist and he had used the last of his own money for this holiday. The four men had lent him some money a few months before and now they wanted it paid back, and if it wasn’t repaid in the next few days then both he and Jade would be shot, cut up and dumped at sea. He said that the men had said that, if Bull was willing to do something for them, they would write off the debt. He told Jade that, if she carried something back to the Netherlands for them, they would both be all right.
Now anyone with any sense and experience could see this was a classic softening-up technique used by men like Nevin Bull who were used to manipulating vulnerable people, especially women. It’s how most of the young women he now had working as prostitutes for him had first fallen into his world. The only reason Jade hadn’t already been brutalized and passed around the other gang members was because Bull knew he had to maintain her feelings for him in order to facilitate using her as a drugs mule.
Jade had been totally taken in, although the story was, to us, clearly nonsense (of course, she had actually been measured by the tailor for the drugs bodysuit). The thing behind her apparent naivety was love: she was madly in love with this character, although it was apparent he showed her little in return. So she believed his story. She also thought that, if she carried out the run, they would be together forever. It was both saddening and pathetic to hear how she believed it to be true.
For the drugs runs, she was duly fitted with the bodysuit full of drugs and put on a plane to Germany. Her instructions were for her to go to her flat in Hamburg, pack a small holdall, making sure that she had no paperwork linking her to either Bull or Jamaica, and then get the train to Amsterdam and then on to the Hook of Holland (buying a cash-paid ticket for the ferry to Harwich). Once in Harwich, she was to take the train to London and then get a taxi to an address that Nevin Bull had written in her diary. At this address, she would meet up with him again and he would take the drugs to another London address before the two returned to Hamburg together.
At eight o’clock that evening, some strangers arrived at the address in London. They were actually my drugs team, backed up with some uniformed officers from Harwich and a couple of police officers to keep the peace (and also to be used as human shields if the Yardies reacted badly). The door was answered by a young blonde woman who was removed from the doorway in a firm but polite way, and then the team went steaming in. Thankfully, there were no armed Yardies in the house so Bob, the ground commander, and the police breathed a silent sigh of relief. What was there was Nevin Bull and his best mate, Paul Morrison, sitting at the dinner table each eating a bowl of soup. They were both arrested and transported to Harwich for questioning. Morrison was later released and would appear again, with his wife, as a witness for the defence.
Right from the start, Bull refused to admit knowing Jade. He even refused to admit that he had been in Jamaica. He stated that he had just driven over from Hamburg to visit an old friend in London. He would stick to this story right up to the trial. So, what did we have on him?
His passport was found hidden under a bed at the London address with the Jamaica stamps in it showing that he had arrived from there into Heathrow that very morning, having left two days after Jade. Our drugs liaison officer had got his hands on the booking and payment details of the hotel in Kingston that the two of them had shared for three weeks plus CCTV video footage of Bull arriving at Heathrow. Then we had the great evidence of Jade’s diary in which Bull had written down the London address. Another great piece of evidence came in the form of a wrap of cocaine that I had found in Bull’s wallet. Now, we couldn’t go into court and state that because he had a wrap of cocaine he must be a smuggler but, bugger me, it does make a jury think.
The final nail in the coffin was Jade herself, and the evidence she could provide to the whole affair. But, to start with, it was really hard work. Her on-call solicitor, Matt, was well known to me. We had legally jousted on many a case before. But what you could say about him was that he had a human side and that he was realistic about defending a person who had so much evidence stacked against them. Some solicitors would cause all kinds of shitstorms to try to get their client off, only to have them get a longer sentence in court when they were found guilty. This is always the way: if you’re found guilty in court after a not-guilty plea, you get a longer sentence than if you had pleaded guilty at the start. A good, pragmatic brief should realistically assess their client’s chances of double-screwing themselves with an indefensible not-guilty plea.
Matt had been with Jade from the first interview and was well aware of how she had assisted us. He had also brought in a German interpreter called Mrs Hess so that there were no misunderstandings during the interviews. Unfortunately, Mrs Hess was an elderly German lady who was not too on the ball with law enforcement techniques. She had a habit of jumping down my throat when she thought I was being rude and, in return, she was much ruder back than we could ever hope to match. Even Matt had to laugh whenever she started barking at me in her strong German accent. That earned him a bark and an evil stare of his own.
Over the months leading up to the trial, Mrs Hess became a surrogate mother to Jade. Every time either Matt or I visited Jade, Mrs Hess had to be there by her side. It was really quite sweet how she wanted to protect her, but also easily understandable because the young woman was clearly very naive and out of her depth. Matt and I joked about telling Mrs Hess the full horrors of Nevin Bull’s treatment of her young charge and then locking her in a room with him. But we decided we’d rather see Bull convicted of trafficking than Mrs Hess convicted of murder.
Normally, once we had arrested, interviewed and charged an individual, that was the last we would see of them before the trial, but in this case it was different. If Jade was to be the coffin nail that I hoped she would be, then I needed her to turn Queen’s Evidence, which meant she would have to stand up in court against Bull. To do this successfully, she would have to give me a full, no-holds-barred witness statement of everything that had happened since she met Bull in his club. And here the problem arose. No matter what Bull had led her into, she still thought she was in love with him. I would need Matt and Mrs Hess’s help to try to change that. As it turned out, fate lent a hand in the form of Holloway Prison.
Most of the public are unaware that there is a huge number of foreign female smugglers in UK prisons and, in Holloway Prison’s case, many of them are linked to the Yardie gangs. One thing that you can accurately say about criminal communications is that their system seems to be so much faster than BT. Within the first three days of her being on remand, Jade had already received four death threats. Matt was straight on the phone to me.
‘Jon, you got her in this shit, you get her out,’ he said. ‘If we help her now, I’m sure that she will play ball come the trial.’
It was questionable whether it was my fault as I wasn’t the one that had got her into drug smuggling – but I could see his point regarding the trial. So I did two things together that would enable her safety. First, I contacted a certain police team based at Scotland Yard. These were the supergrass boys, the officers who could make someone disappear and start a new life. I explained the situation and they jumped at the chance to help (knowing that Customs would foot the bill). Second, and with the help of a nice letter from a judge that I approached, I got Jade moved to a female prison near Sheffield. It made it a swine of a trip up there to interview her, or for her to come to court in Essex, but at least she was safe, and to make double sure of that we had her housed in the hospital wing where she could be watched.
Two days after the move, Matt, Mrs Hess and I arrived at the prison and met Jade in a closed room and not in the open visiting area. I explained the Queen’s Evidence rules and that Bull was saying that he didn’t even know her. She was still worried. For two hours, I tried my best, along with Matt, but we were not gaining ground. I decided I had to try a shock tactic.
‘Jade, look, get this into your head: Bull is going to see you go down and then he’ll be off, back to Hamburg and into the loving arms of one of his other girls. He’s put you in the shit and he’s quite happy to leave you there. And you’re going to be there for the next twenty years.’
Matt tried to appeal to her in a much gentler manner but I responded with more of the brutal truth. ‘And make no mistake,’ I said, ‘in all that time that you’re inside, you’ll only ever see your parents and family twice a month, if that. That’s if you get to see them at all. But, if you want to throw your life away, that’s up to you.’
‘That’s enough, Jon, I think, for now. We need to let Jade think about things.’
We left the room and Matt turned to me and shrugged. ‘The old good cop/bad cop routine. Think it’ll work? Do you think she gets it now?’
I said that I wasn’t sure, but it would be better for her if the routine did work in persuading her to save herself rather than sacrifice herself for a professional criminal. We both now needed a fag so we walked outside and, at the prison door, we each lit up a much-needed smoke.
‘So what do you really think?’ I asked Matt.
He said, ‘I think I’m sexually attracted to Mrs Hess.’
‘Is it the moustache?’ I asked. ‘Because I see what you mean. It’s quite sexy.’
‘It is, but, if she ever cuts it into a little square Hitler one, it’ll be all over between us . . .’
Two cigs each and many Mrs Hess jokes later, we turned to see Mrs Hess standing in the doorway, glaring. ‘You are both bastards,’ she told us firmly. ‘But . . . she says she wants to do it.’
It was with great relief that, when we returned over the next few visits, we managed to get the full story. Then there was a small but very unexpected twist. On one of my last visits, Mrs Hess suddenly grabbed my arm and squeezed it. She said, ‘Have you noticed that Jade has changed?’ I said I had to admit that she was much chattier and seemed to enjoy the visits. ‘No, you idiot,’ Mrs Hess said. ‘She’s in love with you!’
Well, that could be inconvenient, I thought. It was obviously just a case of someone transferring strong feelings to the person they felt was ‘saving’ them, and in this case Jade had decided that was me. Still, I’d rather she mistakenly believed she was in love with me than someone like Bull. The next time I saw him, I told Matt the news, and he just asked if that meant it left the way clear for him and Mrs Hess.
We were quietly confident about the court case, but I knew that, even in the highest courts in the land, things can go tits up. What juries hear is never really the full story – it is only what the law lets them hear. The full story is always known by the defendant, often by the police or Customs, sometimes by the defence, and rarely by the prosecution. The jury were last on the list of people who got to know the full facts. Before a case comes to court, large lumps of it are hacked away by the barristers. Interviews are chopped and changed by them and certain facts are removed for different legal reasons. Items such as telephone taps and information from CROPs officers or undercover agents are often usually known to the judge and investigators only. Deals are struck between defence and prosecution, witnesses are cancelled, and so on. Then there are certain things that go on during the case that normal jury members have no idea about, such as the defendant’s criminal past. The defence can only claim that their client is of good character if they have no record, so, if they don’t say anything along these lines, you can tell their client does have a criminal record. But you are never told straight. It was sometimes a question of listening to what was not said.
On the other hand, judges are fun. I love them. Some are as mad as a bag of hot ferrets and others are as strict as a sergeant major. There are still many judges sitting who have no idea of the world outside their legal lives. They seem to follow the same paths in life: private school to university and then into chambers, followed by becoming a QC and then on to being a judge. No time spent with ordinary people, which is why many judges don’t understand them. The only so-called common people that they get to see are either in the dock or in the witness box, so their view of ‘the man in the street’ is very strange. And the judges certainly don’t want to live on that street, wherever it is.
We had a very simple drug-smuggling case going through one of the Home Counties courts. The judge was ancient (even by judges’ standards) and was hanging on to his job by his old fingernails. Our case depended mainly on evidence gleaned from pager messages between the smuggling gang. The judge had never heard of pagers before. To get around this, we employed an expert from a pager company to give evidence, in children’s terms, as to how the pager system worked. The poor chap was in the box for over an hour and, in the end, it was decided that we would carry out a demonstration. I passed the judge my pager, the expert then phoned the pager control centre and gave them the message; they in turn sent the message to my pager, which the judge was now holding. Within a few seconds, the pager started bleeping and vibrating. The judge put it to his ear. ‘Hello! Hello! Are you there? I can’t hear a damn thing,’ he said. Quickly, the court usher pointed out to the judge the message on the screen of the pager. ‘That’s all well and good,’ said the judge, ‘but I still can’t hear the person on the other end.’
It’s blatantly obvious to all that the one master rule for court is ‘Don’t piss off the judge’. This could also be said of magistrates. Customs is unusual in that it has a legal power that the police lack – a thing called the right of audience. This basically means that officers can appear in the magistrates’ court as solicitors for the department. I ended up doing it hundreds of times throughout my career. This form of legal work is often the making or breaking of many officers. I knew some that would feign illness to get out of doing it. But, once you have twenty or thirty appearances under your belt, it becomes quite good fun and is a great grounding for Crown court. You have to learn very quickly that the opposition’s job is to make you appear stupid and to lead you into traps. Once you know this, you will become a force to be feared in the witness box.
One of our local county judges was a real tartar. In his spare time, he was a lay preacher and during court sessions he was a natural-born bastard and I loved him. He had a soft spot for Customs officers as long as we displayed the character of a Crown-commissioned officer. I was once accused by the prosecution of planting evidence on their client. Now this was a touch hopeful as a defence because we had arrested their client with four kilos of cocaine, body-packed to his torso. I would have had to be Harry Houdini to plant that evidence on him. The judge was so incensed with the accusation that he made the prosecution barrister apologize to me in open court and in front of the jury. Suffice to say that the barrister was my nemesis from that day forth.
This judge just kept surprising us, trial after trial. He was less than complimentary when one of our top officers appeared in front of him sporting a beard, earring and ponytail. But far worse than this was when we had a young officer in the witness box who had changed religion. Our officer had caught a smuggler almost eight months earlier and then, in the time between the arrest and court, he had met a girl and fallen in love. The girl was of the Muslim faith and he loved her so much that he converted to Islam. Now in court, his witness statement had been written while he was Christian, but now he stood in the witness box as a Muslim. The judge was furious and, being a Christian man himself, he could not contemplate how this could have happened; the officer got one of the worst maulings that I have ever seen a judge give anyone. It may have been the Queen’s court but, seeing as she wasn’t there, the judge was going to have things entirely his way.
Barristers do the job because the job is there to be done. They defend the guilty and frustrate the innocent, often making them feel guilty. From what I had seen over the years, it was just a game to most of them, albeit a very well-paid one. The trouble that law enforcement has is that one week they could be working for you, prosecuting in a big case, and then the following week they could be defending against you. This means that anything they learned from you while prosecuting could then be used against you while defending. Not really fair, that.
But, out of the great possible mess that could have come from all this, we actually have a good justice system that most (but not all) of the time works.
A great game we invented for criminal interviews or giving evidence in Crown court was one we called ‘word wizard’. All officers concerned would agree on a subject (for interviews) or a single word (for court). Our task was to then somehow find a way of saying the phrase or word. With interviews you had a big chance of getting lots of words in, for example, if the subject was animals: ‘It’s warm in here, don’t you think it’s getting a little otter?’ The Crown court version of word wizard may have seemed easier because you only had to get one word in, but the words chosen were usually complete bastards. For example, words that we had used include ‘Rumpelstiltskin’, ‘lawnmower’, ‘herpes’ and even ‘skid mark’. The main point, of course, was not to get caught or make yourself look like a complete numpty. Not easy when you’re trying to squeeze Rumpelstiltskin into a sentence.
The Jade/Nevin Bull court case eventually came around and was to last over three weeks. Some of the Jamaican evidence was missing and I was tasked with travelling out there to bring it back personally. But the drugs liaison officer in Kingston informed me that he’d been informed that there were a number of Yardie hitmen waiting for my arrival. I was still ready, willing and able to go out there, but my senior officer put his foot down firmly and stopped me.
The case was presided over by Judge Fox, who was widely regarded as one of the most evil judges to walk the earth. I happened to be extremely lucky as the judge knew me from other cases and I’d often heard him chuckling during my giving of evidence, especially my responses to defence questions (I never liked being backed into a corner by the defence and I usually made that clear).
Mr Adams, counsel for Nevin Bull’s defence, announced in court that I must have planted the cocaine in Mr Bull’s wallet. Mr Bull was, he said, a law-abiding citizen who had served his country in the Army. They then called the Morrison family to give character-witness evidence for Bull. First, Mrs Morrison, who tottered into the witness stand in a very short skirt and a blouse showing ample bosom.
Following her evidence, Judge Fox leaned forward and asked her to explain her profession as he hadn’t quite grasped what she did. Mrs Morrison explained that she was a rep for a company that carried out cosmetic tattooing such as permanent eye-liner and lip-lining. ‘Hmm, I see,’ said Judge Fox. ‘What an incredibly strange thing to want done to oneself.’
Mrs Morrison stated that she’d had it done herself and, as an example, smiled at the judge and opened her eyes wide. Judge Fox leaned forward a little, studied her for a few seconds and then loudly announced his judgment to the court: ‘Don’t take it too personally, Mrs Morrison, but, frankly, you look like a whore! No further questions. You may stand down.’
Mrs Morrison, who didn’t even realize she was there to be judged, didn’t so much stand down as almost keel over sideways with shock. One of the security guards stepped forward and helped her regain her balance and then quickly led her away as she started spluttering.
See, I did say he was evil.
Next up was Paul Morrison, whom we had arrested at the same time as Bull. I had discovered that he had a few Yardie connections but couldn’t tie him into the drugs operation. He was quite a strong character witness, giving credence to much of Bull’s story. All our QC had to do was destroy him in the eyes of the jury.
‘So, Mr Morrison, your wife works but you stated to the jury that you are unemployed and have been for a few years, is that correct?’ asked our QC.
Morrison, being very cocky (a foolish move in the witness box), said, ‘Yeah, that’s right. Have to do a bit of wheeling and dealing to keep a roof over our heads.’
‘I see, Mr Morrison. I’m also informed by the case officer that you have a fair-sized house with five bedrooms. Is this correct?’
‘Yeah, well, we like to call it home.’
‘I see. And, Mr Morrison, I also understand that there are only the two of you living in this smallish mansion.’
‘Yeah, that’s right, just me and the missus. Plenty of room for visitors like when Nevin comes over to see us.’
‘Do you drive, Mr Morrison?’
‘Yeah, been thinking of doing some cabbying but most of the time I just run about for some mates.’
‘Yes, I see. And how did you and Mrs Morrison arrive at court today?’
‘In my old banger,’ said Morrison.
Our QC flashed a quick smile at the judge, who knew exactly where this questioning was going.
‘Really? Well, Mr Morrison. I was sitting in Park Street car park this morning in my old banger when I noticed a brandnew red Mercedes-Benz park across from me. I should say that it was about four months old and my friend the case officer informs me that it’s worth in the order of £55,000. And who should alight from the vehicle but you and your lady wife? Your car, Mr Morrison? Your old banger?’
It only takes a short exchange like that to destroy a witness’s credibility in front of a jury. It was fun watching these court capers when you weren’t on the receiving end. But it could be hellish to be in the firing line when you were giving evidence.
Earlier in the trial, we had put Jade in the box. She looked small and defenceless as she told the jury the story. Some of the women in the court cried, I assume at her naive love for Nevin Bull. Judge Fox, who had already seen her full statement, seemed to take her to his black heart and shielded her from most of the defence’s harder attacks. She did really well, explaining that she knew what she had done was wrong and was expecting to be punished for her part in it. I could see how that went down well with the jury because it made it look as if she was not just giving evidence to save herself. Although it wasn’t a lie on her part – she really did expect to get sent down.
After three weeks, the jury was sent out. They were back after thirty minutes with a clear guilty finding on Bull. Jade had already pleaded guilty five months earlier. The judge then did a strange thing and broke for lunch before sentencing. Meanwhile, I was over the moon, another one for my 100 per cent guilty record of drugs-case convictions. The court usher caught our QC and me just as we were making off for lunch. ‘Judge Fox will see you in his chambers now, gentlemen, if you please.’
We arrived in chambers to watch the judge tucking into his lunch of two hard-boiled eggs and a glass of red wine. He looked up with a well-practised scowl. ‘Well, gentlemen, where are Mr Nevin Bull’s pre-cons?’
I explained to the judge that regarding the pre-cons (previous convictions), I had been in contact with the Royal Military Police (RMP) early in the investigation and they had told me that Bull did have a military record but the details were kept in Germany and as such they had no access to them. Only a UK judge could get the details.
‘Well,’ said Judge Fox, ‘I’m a judge, so make your phone call.’
I hurriedly phoned RMP Berlin and I was speaking to the duty officer, explaining the request (which he remembered), when the judge grabbed the phone from me. ‘Hello. This is Judge Fox, I want to speak to your commanding officer.’
The CO was on the phone within minutes only to get a dressing down by the judge for not supplying me with the case details. As a result, we had the fax of Nevin Bull’s courts martial details within ten minutes. He had been found guilty of running prostitutes and drugs while serving in Germany. Which neatly put paid to the defence’s ‘Army hero’ line.
At sentencing, the judge was more than happy to hand Bell a twenty-nine-year sentence. As for Jade, she was sentenced to the time that she had already spent in prison. And that same afternoon, the supergrass boys from Scotland Yard whipped her away to God knows where to start a new life under a new name.
And so concluded my very first cocaine case.