Eight months earlier, in late March 2008, a security official sat behind an x-ray machine at Istanbul’s Atatürk Airport and carefully scanned the skeletal images that drifted across his screen. Deaf to the departure terminal loudspeaker announcements and the rolling, heaving chatter of a thousand people speaking a dozen different languages, he registered one familiar shape after another. A hardback book. A digital camera. A pair of sunglasses. Some lipstick. A laptop computer, its wiring as complex and intricate as the veins of a dried leaf.
A sports bag passed before his eyes. Before he even knew why, he moved his hand to stop the conveyor belt. There was something inside the bag that was wrong. He blinked to focus his eyes and then peered close at his monitor. What was it? Or, more to the point, what were they? There was a jumble of things, dense pieces of metal machinery and thick wires and…were those bullets? Or were they batteries? He snapped back to the world around him and immediately called for a colleague. Pointing to the screen, they both squinted at the odd but increasingly ominous series of shapes in the bag. Without discussing it, one of them hit an alarm, and a bright yellow light began to flash as a siren wailed. Within seconds, there was the hard clack of boots as half a dozen armed policemen arrived.
After very carefully removing the bag from inside the x-ray machine, one of the security officials pointed to it and demanded to know who it belonged to. He barked this first in Turkish and then, after being greeted by silence, in English. At this point a slim, shy-looking young man with short dark hair and glasses raised a tentative hand and obeyed the order to come to where the bag was without hesitation. The other security officer had already gingerly opened the bag and, wearing a pair of latex gloves, was sifting through the contents. He found and removed a series of shiny, irregular objects. It was immediately obvious that they were bundles of something wrapped in tinfoil.
One of the officers demanded to know what they were—“What is this? What is this? What is this?” he kept repeating—and the young man beside him quietly explained that they were simply parts of a digital camera. The officer took one. With tweezers, the tinfoil was slowly peeled back. Finally, the officer with the tweezers found himself staring at something long, metallic, and unmistakable. It was the barrel of an automatic pistol. His eyes widened. “You have pistol!” he cried. The armed police suddenly turned to try to quickly make sense of what was happening. “They looked at me and I looked at them and then they looked at the security officer,” says Stephen, describing the seconds before a scrum of men fell upon him. “I remember they had initially thought it was a bomb, and that’s what had panicked them. They were on the verge of evacuating the place.”
It was not a bomb. Stephen had a Browning Hi-Power semiautomatic pistol in his luggage. He had stripped it, mixed the various component parts with assorted electrical items, including bits of a camera and power cables, taped them together, and then wrapped these bundles in tinfoil in the belief that it would somehow scramble the airport security x-rays and allow him to smuggle the gun back to the UK. The tinfoil did not, in fact, scramble the airport security x-rays. “I had this weird idea that wrapping something in foil would deflect the rays. But a twenty-two-year-old should know how x-rays work,” he says, frowning. “There were times where I could do some really stupid stuff.”
A week earlier, on March 16, 2008, Stephen had arrived in Istanbul with a plan to buy the gun—the real gun—he had been obsessed with acquiring for so long. He had not come directly from the UK. Instead, within a few days of the Ledbury HSBC attempt and the Worcester Barclays robbery, Stephen went on holiday to Europe. First, he returned to Dechen Chöling, where he stayed as a guest in the old château. It was misty and quiet in the French countryside. On March 7, shortly after arriving, he wrote about how different it felt now compared to the previous year: empty, overcast, almost eerie somehow.
Of DCL, perhaps there is too much to write tonight. Disappointing? Yes. Weird? Even more. Disturbing? To a degree! Why? The people, the lack of people, the flickering lights.
A sense of belonging that existed the previous summer now seemed to be gone.
By the following day, though, he seemed to be easing into things. At the Buddhist retreat where he first committed to his course of action, he now plotted its endgame.
It’s so relaxing here. And it has given me time to review my plans. We will go to Turkey and get the tool, after visiting Cadaqués and Barcelona.
He then noted that the total cost of the trip would amount to some £1,500, not including the £350 or so he had budgeted for a gun.
Looked on the web, and it seems the Worcester newspaper has published 2 CCTV pictures of the robberies, both clear. We will need to be careful.
On a new line he finishes the day’s entry.
BTW, a brilliant sleep.
The day after that, March 10, he made another short note.
Second day in a row relaxing, meditating and reading. Weather has turned wet and cold so mostly indoors. Two mini workout sessions. You need to think how you’re going to conceal a handgun from Turkey.
From France, Stephen traveled south to Spain as planned and then flew from Barcelona to Istanbul. His research had led him to conclude that this represented his best chance of finding a real pistol. With gun ownership laws in Turkey considerably less stringent than across most of Europe, the supply of firearms—both new and used—was high. Guns, he read, could be found in one of every three Turkish households, and the vast majority of these weapons were unlicensed and unregistered. As he made his way from Atatürk Airport to the cheap hotel he’d booked for seven nights, he looked out the window of the transfer bus at the sprawling metropolis around him: at the traffic; the high-rise towers; the minarets and domes; the wide, palm-lined boulevards; and the occasional glimpse of cargo ships moving across the Sea of Marmara, looming hazy on the horizon. Why had he not come here sooner, he wondered? He unfolded a piece of paper on which he had scribbled an address. He stared at it for a while, then carefully placed it back in his pocket.
He visited the tourist sites. The Topkapi Palace. The Blue Mosque. Roman and Byzantine ruins. Ancient catacombs. Wandering the city alone, he visited street markets and souks. He visited the Grand Bazaar, a sprawling labyrinth of indoor streets home to hundreds and hundreds of shops, stalls, and merchants hawking everything from jewelry to carpets, antiques to clothes, plates, confectionary, pastries, shoes, and handbags. It was packed with people, a mix of tourists and locals, and the colors were kaleidoscopic. The sound of music and of fast, fluent sales patter bounced off the high vaulted ceilings, pushing Stephen’s tolerance for noise to its limit as he drifted through the crowded streets and alleys. Eventually, he came out the other side of the bazaar and into the open. Moving away from the huge structure, he walked through tight, winding streets that were still packed with shops but seemed shabbier, quieter, and free from gaping holidaymakers.
Eventually, though, he found what he was looking for. A shop front on a quiet street. There was no mistaking what it sold. On display in the window were dozens of handguns, hunting rifles, knives, and binoculars. Stephen’s heart trilled. He stepped inside the shop and made his way to the counter, where a middle-aged Turkish man was watching him.
What happened next is a little confused. Stephen had memorized a few Turkish words and phrases to help him explain that he wanted to buy a handgun, but communication with the shopkeeper was stop-start and unclear. “I remember having to answer lots of questions. He wouldn’t just give it to me,” says Stephen. “It didn’t help that he didn’t speak English that well; it was ‘What do you want it for?’—that kind of thing. I remember I said clay pigeon shooting.”
The idea that it might be a little unorthodox to turn up to a clay pigeon shooting event with an automatic pistol, given that you typically use shotguns for the sport, did not occur to Stephen. Nor did it seem to bother the shopkeeper. In an otherwise empty shop on a small, quiet street, he eventually agreed to sell Stephen a used Browning pistol and a box of ammunition. Stephen paid him about 560 Turkish lira—some £225—before quickly returning to his hotel room, his mind already racing with the different possibilities now finally open to him. He could begin a heist with a bullet fired into the air to demonstrate his seriousness and thus ensure compliance when demanding access to the safe. He could conduct a “tiger takeover,” springing out when bank staff arrived and forcing them to take him to the vault. He could target large cash-in-transit deliveries. He floated back through the Grand Bazaar half in a dream. The noise did not even bother him.
When Stephen returned to his hotel room and unpacked the pistol from its box, he sat on his bed to examine it. On one side of the barrel, it had the word browning stamped in black steel. On the other side, it said umarex—lizenzfertigung, which made Stephen frown. He had thought Browning was an American-made gun. So why the German? He unwrapped the box of ammunition and then, with a sinking sensation, immediately understood how he’d been able to acquire the pistol so easily. The store owner had not sold him a fully functional gun. The bullets were blanks. The box said so. He picked one out and immediately saw they were just cartridges—small, copper-colored tubes—with no bullet at the end. He went online and searched for “Umarex” and found that it was a German company that made replica, blank-firing versions of real firearms.
DI Fox says Stephen’s diaries from this period describe how he had bought a replica by mistake. “He thought he had bought a real gun and then he got it back to his hotel and realized it is just a blank firer and is wondering if it can be converted or not,” says Fox. Blank-firing guns can sometimes be “converted” into live-firing guns by altering some of the internal mechanisms and replacing parts of the barrel. “He thinks he might be able to do so, so he decides he is going to bring it back.”
Today, Stephen says he quickly got over the disappointment of not securing a real gun. “I wasn’t too bothered, to be honest. The only reason I wanted a live one was because in the case of imminent arrest, I would have used it on myself,” he says matter-of-factly. “That was the only negative to getting a blank-firing one. But I thought, why not think positively? That is not going to happen, and I just need this one to cause a noise.”
He sat on his hotel bed and stared at the gun. He had a very strong urge to load and fire it, there and then. “But I didn’t think it was a good idea, and I remember restraining myself. But I did sit there for a long time thinking, I really want to see what it does.” In the end, he decided to wait until his return to the UK. There was a small, remote valley in some woodland outside of Worcester. That, he told himself, is where he would test it. Suddenly, he felt very impatient to return home.
Which is why, two days later, Stephen was at the departures terminal at Atatürk Airport, surrounded by armed police and accused of trying to smuggle a pistol onto a plane. Which was more or less true. He was marched to an interview room, where he faced an incredulous security officer who spoke through a translator, a middle-aged Turkish woman who sat between the two of them.
Just because the gun fired blanks did not mean it was harmless. It was not an inert replica or even a BB gun. The cartridges it “fired” still contained gunpowder; this powder just didn’t project a bullet down the barrel. Instead, it discharged the wood or plastic wadding used to keep the powder in the cartridge. At short ranges, this discharge could still be harmful, sometimes even fatal. If the cartridges themselves were damaged or imperfect, they could jam, and when the trigger was pulled again, the jammed metal cartridge casings could be fired from the barrel. Stuntmen have been killed by faulty blank-firing guns on movie sets. They were, under British law, considered a firearm. And nowhere in the world can you simply take one onto a commercial airliner. So what, the Turkish security officer demanded to know, did Stephen think he was doing trying to sneak one onto a plane?
He had a story ready for them. He told them that he was a student who was just on his way back after a sightseeing holiday in Istanbul. He had the blank-firing gun, he continued, because a friend at university bet him £100 that he wouldn’t be able to get one back into the UK. Was this the kind of bet that university students make with their friends? Stephen didn’t really know. He didn’t have any friends. But this was the story he gave. He watched the face of the stern security officer while the translator relayed this in Turkish. He absorbed it impassively. A pair of police officers were summoned, and Stephen was escorted to a small holding cell within the airport.
At this point, Stephen knew that he had reached the end. Even with all his faith that the universe would take care of him, he understood that he couldn’t expect the same kind of reprieve he’d experienced after being arrested at Schiphol. “I thought, this is it. There is no way they won’t be able to join the dots now.”
There was already another man inside the holding cell. He was Turkish, heavyset, and probably in his sixties. He glowered at Stephen, who felt intimidated but nevertheless continued to pace the cell, remonstrating with himself. Eventually, the Turkish man addressed him in a deep voice.
“You bring drugs?”
Stephen stopped and looked at him. He shook his head and began to explain everything. The man stared at him from beneath heavy eyes and then, once Stephen had finished, simply said, “You go to jail for a long time.”
Stephen squeezed his eyes shut. “I remember asking him, ‘What are Turkish jails like?’ ” he says. “He looked at me for a long time. And then he just started to laugh.”
But after a few hours, something unexpected happened. He was collected and taken back to the security officer who’d first interrogated him. Speaking through the translator, he explained that after very, very careful consideration, they would release him. They would keep his firearm and he was to never—never—attempt anything like this again. Stephen nodded vigorously. As he was escorted back to the departures terminal, he felt like laughing. He turned to the translator who was walking beside him, and though he can no longer remember exactly what he said, he made some passing reference to Amsterdam and the fact that he had experienced something similar there. “I mentioned something about Holland. Not that I was wanted there,” he says quickly. “But she must have figured out there was some issue. I think I kind of asked her if I would be blocked again at customs because of the Holland thing, and then she marched back to this place where all the police officers were, and she told them what I had told her.”
So Stephen was returned to the holding cell. “I was ready to punch myself for being so stupid.” But after another long wait, he was released a second time. It helped, he thinks, that aside from parts of a firearm wrapped in tinfoil, his bag contained all the things you might expect a young tourist to have, including guidebooks and souvenirs. If they found his diary, they either did not read it or did not pay it close enough attention to spot the references to bank heists and his need for a real gun. It also helped that Stephen was young, nervous, and bookish. He says that the attitude of the Turkish police changed markedly when he produced his University of Worcester ID card, almost as though they were relieved he really was the out-of-his-depth student he was presenting himself as. “After showing them the card, they just waved their hands and said, ‘Get him out.’ ”
The Turkish authorities never contacted the British police about what Stephen had tried to do. He could have stopped at this point—forgotten about the Organisation—and it is very likely he could have just gotten on with his life as a geography and sociology undergraduate. Instead, Stephen sat on the plane back to the UK trying to work out what to do next. He tried to think positively. That blank-firing Browning wasn’t really what he’d been after anyway, he told himself. But it had felt so close. “€270 wasted,” he wrote as the plane approached London. “The whole Turkey trip cost around £800. I need to stop wasting money.”
At MDC Brooklyn, Stephen described all this to the witch doctor. The two of them were sitting in their cell, eating bowls of rice and beans. Stephen had discovered not only that his Haitian cellmate boasted supernatural abilities, but that he was also a gourmand. A contraband cache of spices and seasonings meant that he was able to transform the bland prison meals into something altogether more exotic. “He had some very strange ways, although he was a great cook. He could turn some really shitty food into something decent.”
“I can read futures and help sickness,” he told Stephen one evening after lockdown. “In my country I am very well known.” Every so often Stephen would return to his cell to find the witch doctor dealing with another inmate. He quickly came to learn they were having private consultations and that he was telling their fortunes, making them grasp hold of a special charm while he chanted and entered trance states. He seemed to command a high level of respect across the unit and among Hispanic inmates in particular.
One man, though, was universally acknowledged as untouchable, a de facto figurehead for all prisoners regardless of race. He was a bald, thickset Hispanic man from New York who simply went by the nickname Monsoon. He was forty-ish, amiable, heavily tattooed, and had a direct, appraising gaze. A former drug dealer and gang member, he was waiting to stand trial for murder. He was also an evangelical Christian who led a popular though informal church service on the wing every Sunday at two p.m. He would announce the commencement of the service by slowly walking up and down the unit and, in a deep, resounding voice, crying out “I-GLE-SI-A! I-GLE-SI-A!” Stephen attended these services and was blown away by Monsoon’s intense charisma. “It is no overstatement to say that he literally burned with evangelical faith,” says Stephen. Monsoon was often called upon to mediate disputes between prisoners. On several occasions, Stephen saw him physically intervene in order to prevent violence.
One night, after lockdown, the witch doctor offered to read Stephen’s fortune. Not wishing to seem rude, he agreed. The witch doctor chanted while Stephen grasped a charm, and then, after appearing to lie down and fall asleep on his bunk, he opened his eyes suddenly, sat up, and presented his findings.
“You have led an interesting life. Done many good things. Many bad things.”
Stephen nodded. He just about resisted the temptation to speak out and say, well, yes, that’s a pretty safe assumption to make about anyone in jail. Instead, he asked whether the witch doctor could tell him anything else.
“People look for you,” he said quietly. “Be careful.”
Stephen had to bite his lip. This would have been really helpful information eight months ago. It was altogether less helpful now that he was being held in a large federal prison. He asked the witch doctor what the coming years held. The tanned, leathery face of the man before him creased into a deep frown. He shook his head and could offer only vague generalities. The only thing he seemed certain of was that the year 2014 would be a particularly dark one. Though even then, he would not say why.
Stephen said he wanted to know about the future. But as the weeks passed at MDC Brooklyn, he found that he was spending more and more time thinking about the recent past. Instead of fantasizing about escape, he kept returning to that unexpected question posed by the prison warden. Why had he turned to crime when he had other opportunities ahead of him? Had it been the right thing to do? Would he do it again if he had the chance? If reality really is as malleable as he believed, then how come he was eating rice and beans with a witch doctor in a Brooklyn jail? How much good had he actually achieved? How much harm had he done? And to whom?
This shift toward introspection was slow but sure. During the months of solitary confinement, his primary focus had been survival. Free from the distraction of other people and perspectives, he allowed himself to brood over the injustice of it all. His own personal accountability did not figure in his thoughts. Since coming out of solitary, first at Strafford County and now here, he’d met more and more other inmates. They all had their own stories, their own reasons, and their own feelings about whether they had done something wrong. Often, they acknowledged they had. “Many of the prisoners I encountered in America came across as normal, grounded, intelligent, and remorseful,” Stephen explains. “American drug laws meant that what would be a relatively minor offense in the UK could equate to many years in prison in the U.S. It meant many people had lived next-to-normal lives before they came to prison.”
Stephen was befriended by an inmate called Michael. A short, fit man in his late thirties with pale blond hair, he had been handed a nine-year sentence for counterfeiting money and for the supply of amphetamines. Michael read paperback books of philosophy. He followed world events and had a serious-minded, almost teacherly way of talking. The two of them spent hours discussing what was happening in the world around them, the economic catastrophe that, by late December 2008, had unleashed the worst global recession since 1929. As a counterfeiter, Michael knew firsthand just how much value ordinary people placed in the pieces of paper the banks handed them, and he knew that the modern, human desire for more money—at the expense of all else—would never be cured. At this very moment, just across town at the Metropolitan Correctional Center in Manhattan, a con man named Bernie Madoff was in the same brown federal prison uniform as Stephen and Michael. He was waiting to stand trial for orchestrating a Ponzi scheme that prosecutors alleged resulted in investors being defrauded of $65 billion. Michael predicted, correctly, that Madoff would spend the rest of his life behind bars. But, he continued, while jails will continue to fill with ordinary people who have turned to crime in the face of recession and foreclosures, most of those responsible will simply walk away from the crisis they helped to create with multimillion-dollar payouts.
Even Stephen expressed some doubt at this. But it was true. Lehman Brothers CEO Dick Fuld—“the Gorilla of Wall Street”—would amass almost $500 million in compensation during his tenure as head of the bank, a tenure that ended only when the bank itself did. Stephen asked Michael why he’d turned to crime in the first place. “I wanted what was best for my son,” he said.
New Year’s Eve came a week or so later. All the inmates in MDC Brooklyn had been in their cells for hours by the time midnight came, but they cheered and shouted and smacked the bars as they welcomed in 2009. From his dark cell, Stephen put his hands to the narrow window and looked out. Across the water he could see the Manhattan skyline suddenly lit up by a million flashing colors. The last time he’d seen a fireworks display had been years ago, as a little boy on the Sidmouth seafront. He had been with his father and they had walked back home together, through their little seaside town nestled between the sea, cliffs, and countryside. He had gone back to his cramped little bedroom, filled with books and fossils and posters of planets, and fallen asleep in his bed wondering if his mom might be back home the next day.
Standing there, shivering in his prison uniform, watching the Empire State Building turn from red to white to blue, the reality of it all finally seemed to snap into focus. This was not an adventure. He was not Robin Hood. “I just remember thinking…what am I doing here?”