DISCLAIMER: STAT MAGAZINE DOES NOT CONDONE THE USE, POSSESSION, OR SALE OF ILLICIT SUBSTANCES. DO NOT TRY THIS AT HOME.
There’s a scene in The Wizard of Oz where Dorothy tells the recently exposed Wizard that she thinks he’s a very bad man, to which the Wizard replies: “Oh, no, my dear. I’m a very good man. I’m just a very bad wizard.” To paraphrase the duplicitous Wizard, I’m really a very good man, but I was a very bad cocaine dealer.
Mine is a predictably cautionary tale, but – if you’ll forgive the cliche – failure is the best teacher. I learnt some terrific life lessons along the way of my career that I’d like to impart to you.
I was only doing it to sort my mates out and get mine cheap
This is how it invariably begins as a recreational drugs enthusiast looking to buy in bulk to cut costs for you and your pals and perhaps even make a few quid. You soon discover cocaine is a seller’s market, and there’s an insatiable appetite for the full Colombian breakfast. And of course, with greater access the greater your consumption. Yet, for the longest time I clung to the notion it was a hobby not a job. Eventually, it came to define me. And woe betide the defendant who uses “I only sold it to friends” as mitigation in crown court.
Location, location, location
By sheer happenstance, my patch was north of the River Mersey and ended at Levenshulme. This area was known as bandit country, but as a Star Trek fan I preferred to call it the neutral zone because it was the border between Manchester and Stockport.
There was by all accounts an unwritten rule that allowed the various organised crime factions to operate in this border area, but no one would control it – thus avoiding costly territorial disputes. This meant a non-gang affiliated independent trader such as myself could sell cocaine without fear of being persecuted by the local heavies.
Love thy neighbour
The police aren’t particularly clever. That’s not to say they’re particularly stupid either, but you can forget those TV sleuths with brilliant insights into the human condition and amazing powers of deduction. The police tend to be linear in their thinking, and I’ll go as far to say the average mid-tier dealer has greater native cunning than the average copper has detective smarts.
What the police are good at is following up leads, knocking on doors, and making sure – resources permitting – no stone is left unturned. What this means in real terms is that if the old, curtain-twitching lady a few doors down sees you’re up to something suspicious and makes a call, an officer will eventually come and investigate. Even if nothing comes of it, you’re on their radar. And it doesn’t take much for you to then become a person of interest. Next thing you know your car starts getting randomly pulled over and you’re doing a roadside drugs test whilst your vehicle is being searched.
One can’t entirely remove the risk, but you can manage it by becoming an integral part of the community. Mow your neighbours’ side of the front garden, feed your other neighbour’s cat whilst they’re on holiday, and the busy couple across the road? Walk their dog. Oh, and tip the window cleaner handsomely at Christmas. As the song says, “If you could see what I can see when I’m cleaning windows.”
The supplier I got my gear from took it to extremes to put himself beyond suspicion. Kenny grew a long beard, wore glasses with clear lenses, and drove a Volvo estate so he looked more like a university lecturer from Chorlton than a wrong’un from Denton. He even left his house early every morning so his neighbours would think he had a proper job.
This was rendered moot, however, because Kenny was blabbing his head off to other crims on one of those uncrackable EncroChat phones that surprise, surprise, the authorities cracked. But that’s a story for another day.
Buy now, pay forever
When I started out I was adamant I wasn’t going to give tick – it’s too much mither. If someone wants a bag they’ll have to pay for it. This didn’t last long, as I quickly realised credit is as much a part of the drugs business as any legitimate concern because cocaine is the ultimate impulse purchase.
Let’s say it’s a Thursday evening and a customer has had a few pints after work. He’s desperate for a line and it’s a week before payday. So he buys it on tick as an impulse and eventually regrets it the next day.
Now, I could refuse the customer and rob him of a good time. He’d be annoyed in the moment, but he’d be as happy as a pig in muck the next morning knowing he didn’t owe me any money. Nah, I’m not losing out on 50 quid to be collected the following week.
You see, selling cocaine is easy. The real skill lies in account management. I knew all the financial pressures customers were under, when they got paid, additional income streams, hell I knew when their partners got paid. You really had to stay on top of these things.
The sheep confesses to the wolf
Cocaine is an intense drug and the relationships I built with my clients often reflected this. I might see my best customers six, seven days a week. Outside of your own household you don’t see anyone that often, and such is the nature of frequent contact – you get to know each other pretty well.
Alas, like a toxic relationship it was built on secrets and lies. With most hardcore users I would be the only one aware of the extent of their habit. In some cases their husbands and wives (it was usually wives) wouldn’t even know they did drugs, let alone how broken they were. Likewise, I was a dealer and that was information you didn’t want shared.
We did our best to protect each other’s secrets as we were bound together by an unspoken agreement of mutually assured destruction. Less palatable were the lies such as “I’ll definitely pay you next Friday,” and amusingly “This one isn’t for me I’m getting it for a mate.” It’s a curious thing that even to their dealer they were in denial. I used to go along with it as it made them feel better.
Sometimes being the worst isn’t the worst
It turns out there is a lot of money to be made in the sale of illicit drugs. Seriously, the profit margins are huge.
That sounds glib, but honestly if you saw how I did my best for over a decade to disprove what a cash bonanza slinging cocaine is you’d appreciate my world-weary sarcasm.
But I was at it for over a decade. How bad could I have been? Well, that’s the thing: I wasn’t bad enough, the worst kind of bad.
If you’re good it stands to reason you’ll make lots of money, avoiding addiction and legal entanglements. At the opposite end of the spectrum, being an objectively terrible coke dealer is a better option than you might think.
Why? Because it’s all over so quickly. You’re unreliable, you cut the product so you lose your customers. In turn your supplier will cut off your credit because he’ll see you’re sniffing more than you’re selling and just like that it’s all over. You’ll have a debt to pay off and some bridges to mend but you burnt out before you could do too much damage.
No, the worst place to be is in the middle. Good enough to stay afloat and keep out of trouble but not good enough to make any real money.
Each week, Sisyphus-like, I’d push the boulder up the hill then come the weekend I’d snort. Not all of it, but enough to mean there was little profit left. Come Monday morning the boulder would be back at the bottom and I’d start pushing it up the hill, again swearing this time it was going to be different.
Loose lips sink ships
Chris REDACTED was a relative latecomer to the north Stockport drugs scene, but he took the fast track to success with a particularly aggressive sales strategy.
Chris was a scaffolder, and within the building trade scaffolders have a reputation for low intelligence and being good at the old two-fisted science on account of the rather robust physiques they develop swinging about on scaffolding poles every day. Chris took these attributes and applied them to dealing.
He didn’t exactly bully anyone for business. He was, however, fearless in who he approached to the point of recklessness. In short order he gained a large clientele and within a year had outstripped the other independent dealers in the area.
It didn’t go unnoticed.
At the end of an evening spent in Town Bar wooing impressionable young lasses with champagne and coke, he was accosted on his way home by a tidy little firm from Brinnington who threw the worse for wear Chris into the back of a Bedford Rascal.
No one I knew in underworld circles had heard of this crew from Brinnington before or since. That doesn’t mean anything, mind you. Only vainglorious idiots want to gain a reputation, real gangsters move in silence.
They took Chris to an undisclosed address, presumably on Brinny Estate, and preceded to torture him for his newfound cocaine riches they’d heard about on the grapevine.
It turns out Christopher, despite his largesse, was all fur coat and no knickers and just like the rest of us he was spending it as quickly as he was earning it. His captors didn’t care – they were going to get paid regardless and for the next 24 hours whilst trapped in a waterless bath, Chris went through his contacts pleading for cash as the assault continued. It’s amazing what you can achieve when truly desperate, and by hook or by crook his friends and family raised sufficient funds for Chris to be released.
This ghastly affair taught me three invaluable lessons:
- When you’re an independent dealer without the comforting protection of a gang, you’re on your own. If the fit hits the shan like it did for poor Chris, no one will rescue you.
- Never save familial names such as “Mum” and “Dad” in your phone contacts or endearing monikers like “Our Kid” or “Misses”. These are weaknesses that can be exploited.
- An empty bath is the best place to carry out torture. Baths are difficult to escape from and any evidence of your wickedness can be washed down the plug hole with minimal fuss. Real macabre stuff.
The extent of Chris’ injuries was much speculated on from minor to major and no one really knew the answer. The reason for this was he not only retired from the drug game with immediate effect, but such was the psychological impact of his experience that he left the area permanently. Well, I assume he did as I never saw him again.
It occurs first very slowly, then all at once
There’s many more observations I’d like to share with you, but we don’t have either the time or space. So let me tell you how it ended. There weren’t flashing sirens and a dramatic arrest – it came to a close with a whimper and obscurity.
A couple of my friends were chatting about a party they had recently attended, a party that I knew nothing about: Henry’s party. Henry was my step-brother and he had a birthday party I wasn’t invited to because nobody wanted me there.
You make lots of new friends dealing, but it’s cupboard love. All the while, you lose real friends who don’t fall out with you as such, they just don’t want the Pavlovian temptation that I had come to represent around them. I hadn’t seen Henry in years. I’d been edged out of his life. It was easier that way. They had moved on and I had not.
To that point I had lost so much, but nothing stung quite as intensely as finding out about Henry’s party after the event. If that wasn’t quite the end, it was certainly the beginning of it.
We started with a film quote so let’s finish with another. There’s a scene in The Godfather Part II where Don Michael Corleone is discussing with the film’s antagonist Hymen Roth the murder of the gangster Moe Green. And though Roth laments the death of his friend, he accepts it because “This is the business we’ve chosen.”
all illustrations by Samuel Jones
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