Good Cop, Bad War Read online

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  About the Book

  About the Author

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Chapter 1. Buxton

  Chapter 2. Derby

  Chapter 3. Glossop

  Chapter 4. Derby II

  Chapter 5. Chesterfield

  Chapter 6. Clowne

  Chapter 7. Whitwick

  Chapter 8. Stoke

  Chapter 9. New Mills

  Chapter 10. Wakefield

  Chapter 11. Leicester

  Chapter 12. Nottingham

  Chapter 13. Northampton

  Chapter 14. Brighton

  Chapter 15. Buxton II

  Chapter 16. A Thousand Wasted Years

  Acknowledgements

  Copyright

  About the Book

  Neil Woods was the first and best of his kind – an undercover cop whose brief was to infiltrate Britain’s most dangerous drug gangs, befriending the foot soldiers before taking on their gangster bosses.

  Starting out in the early 90s and making the rules up as he went, Neil was at the forefront of police surveillance. He quickly earned a name as the most successful operative of his time and his expertise was called upon by drugs squads around the country to tackle an ever-growing problem.

  But after years on the streets, spending time with the vulnerable users at the bottom of the chain, Neil began to question the seemingly futile war he was risking both his life and sanity for. What if the real enemy wasn’t who he thought?

  Good Cop, Bad War is an intense account of the true effects of the war on drugs and a gripping insight into the high pressure world of British undercover policing.

  About the Author

  Neil Woods spent fourteen years (1993-2007) infiltrating drug gangs as an undercover policeman, befriending and gaining the trust of some of the most violent, unpredictable criminals in Britain. With the insight that can only come from having fought on its front lines, Neil came to see the true futility of the war on drugs: that it demonises those who need help, and only empowers the very worst elements in society. Neil is the chairman of LEAP UK, the British chapter of the international organisation Law Enforcement Against Prohibition – an advocacy group exclusively made up of law enforcement officials. He also appeared on Channel 4’s Drugs Live.

  For Lynette, the love of my life.

  And for Gareth and Tanith, who make me so proud.

  It is for our young that we should fight for change.

  CHAPTER 1

  BUXTON

  THE COIN HUNG in the air, daring me to breathe. For a single moment everything just stopped. Then I snapped out my right hand, caught it and slammed it down on the table.

  A pause. Two long, deep breaths. Then I lifted my hand away. There it was, heads, the Queen’s profile winking up at me.

  So, that was that. I was becoming a cop.

  ‘Well, if that’s your decision, son, I’m sure you’ll see it through.’

  The reaction from my family was pretty much as expected. My father believed in the calm, thoughtful path. Every question could be reasoned out, and whoever lost their temper first also lost the argument. Throughout my entire childhood I don’t think I remember hearing a single voice raised in anger.

  My mum was a bit more concerned.

  ‘The police, Neil? Are you sure that’s for you?’

  I could understand her anxiety. I had lasted less than a year on my business studies course at Salford Polytechnic before dropping out and coming back home – not exactly a demonstration of commitment or hard-headed practicality. But even at nineteen I knew that moping around, stacking shelves at Marks & Spencer wasn’t for me. I wanted something more. I needed to prove myself – I needed adventure.

  I had originally planned to find that adventure the standard way teenagers did in 1989: by saving up for a Eurorail pass, and fruit-picking my way around Europe while trying to chat up exotic foreign girls. But then I stumbled on the police recruitment ad at the back of the local paper.

  At first the idea seemed completely ludicrous, beyond absurd. But something about it struck deep. I found myself daydreaming about this, more than even the topless beaches of Marseille. The thought grew and gnawed at me, becoming almost a fixation. Somehow, deep down, I knew this was something I had to do, that I could never face myself in the mirror if I didn’t step up to the self-imposed challenge.

  That’s how I ended up standing at my desk, flipping a coin, with a police recruitment application and a map of southern France laid in front of me. Tails, I was taking off around Europe. Heads, I’d join Her Majesty’s law enforcement.

  My girlfriend Sam also seemed bewildered.

  ‘You… a police officer?’ she squealed with laughter.

  ‘Yes… I just… ’ I paused and fumbled, searching for the words, before simply blurting out, ‘I just want to help protect people.’

  As naïve and silly as I must have sounded, something in my garbled melodramatic phrase struck a chord in our own relationship. Sam and I had met as teenagers. I was at the boys’ school, she was at the girls’, and our paths crossed at parties and school discos – a fairly old-school story. We had a lot of fun in those early days, sneaking bottles of cider with our little gang, discovering the world together – doing all the things young lovers are meant to do. But I also saw something else in Sam. I often felt there was something vulnerable or melancholy about her, something that needed protection. I tried my best to be there when she needed me, and to support her through whatever she was going through. Looking back, I can see that helping Sam also allowed me to feel a sense of purpose. As a kid I’d spent entire days tearing through all the classic adventure books by Bernard Cornwell, C.S. Forester and all the rest. These were stories of men – and they were usually men – doing the right thing in difficult circumstances. That impulse to do the right thing, to come through in the hour of need, defined my early relationship with Sam, but it was also what propelled me towards the police.

  Because, truth be told, most other aspects of my character wouldn’t have marked me out as ideal cop material. Aside from reading, my only real obsession was music. I’d burn through every issue of Melody Maker and the NME, before racing to the local library to find the new records by Black Sabbath or the Smiths, along with the old greats like Jimi Hendrix and the Beatles. A friend of mine told me that smoking hash was amazing for listening to records, so we would occasionally score a bit of dope off someone’s older brother, then lie back to listen to the Doors and Yes. As promised, it was pretty amazing.

  But this was also the era that saw the birth of the War on Drugs. I watched Ronald Reagan on TV saying that one smoke of crack would get you addicted for life, and believed it without question. Those worlds of addiction and violence seemed a universe away from my friends and me, smoking a bit of weed and listening to rock & roll – but the cowboy-ish, War on Drugs mythology gradually seeped in.

  That’s where the idea of joining the police really came from. There were bad people out there preying on the weak and vulnerable, and they needed to be stopped. I wanted to fight the good fight – to catch the bad guys and protect the innocent from vicious criminals. Basically, I was young and naïve, and like most young men setting off on an adventure, this became about discovering who I really was.

  It took about six months just to qualify for training. The first interview was at home. The police wanted to know what kind of families their recruits came from. I don’t think mine could have been any more ideal unless my old man had been a copper himself.

  If the mythical ‘Middle England family’ that politicians fawn over in their focus groups really exists, we were it. Having been sent to the coalmines during the Second
World War, my father had worked his way up to become a regional agent for small businesses around the Midlands and north of England. We lived in Buxton, a picturesque market town just at the edge of the Peak District, and while we certainly weren’t wealthy, we didn’t want for anything either.

  In any case, we seemed to pass muster with the Derbyshire Constabulary, and I was invited for further testing.

  The first examination was not at all what I had expected. We were split into groups of four and handed a pile of newspaper clippings. We were then told to decide, as a group, which issues were the greatest priorities for UK policing.

  This was the summer of 1989 and the country was experiencing the birth of the acid house rave scene. The tabloid press were reacting with typical hysteria, as if a few kids getting loved up and dancing in a field spelled the end of Western civilisation. So, the other guys in my group all put the acid house stories at the top of their list.

  Now, this was something I actually knew about. When I had started my business studies course, I had turned up at eighteen-years-old in Manchester, in 1988. This was quite a magical time and place to be alive. I never got into ecstasy, but the music itself had blown me away. A few tokes on a spliff and I could dance all night at the Hacienda with everyone else. One thing I absolutely knew was that ninety-nine per cent of what was written about this scene was bright shining bullshit. It was certainly nowhere near as serious as the other headlines we were presented with in the exam – stories of guns, beatings and real organised crime.

  But the other guys in my group were completely adamant, and I realised they weren’t about to change their minds. So I suggested a compromise, treating the rave headlines as a medium priority, and we presented our results.

  What I learned later was that the examiners didn’t particularly care what order the clippings went in. What caught their eye was that my first instinct was to suggest a compromise, rather than just sticking blindly to my position. Above all else, an effective police officer needs mental flexibility. You need to be able to adapt and change at a moment’s notice. Out of the twelve people on our examination team, four were selected. I made the cut.

  Suddenly everything became very real and very serious. This was it. I really was becoming a cop.

  CHAPTER 2

  DERBY

  THERE’S NO NICE way to say it: I was crap.

  My very first call-out after training was to break up a fight between two groups of known local troublemakers that was kicking off in a pub car park. I did exactly as I had been trained, placing myself between the gangs and trying to de-escalate the situation. ‘Look,’ I began, trying to stare down a massive skinhead almost vibrating with barely contained rage, ‘I’m sure we can all just calm down and—’

  I never even finished the sentence. The guy just pushed straight past me and drove his fist hard into the face of one of the rival gang members. The entire crowd immediately exploded, and the rest of my team had to pile in to break up the melee, sustaining several minor injuries on the way.

  That brawl should never have even started. I had failed to project authority. And in a tense situation, a cop who can’t assert authority can be more dangerous than no cop at all. Once people lose faith in the idea of the police, things can spiral into anarchy very quickly – especially when everyone is a bit pissed.

  I just couldn’t seem to find my place. The constant split-second decision-making was almost impossible, and I was no good with violent confrontation. I had been brought up to reason things out, to talk issues through and find common ground. This is generally a positive approach, but not much use when trying to break up a pitched battle between pissed-up hooligans outside a pub.

  In those first few months, situations that could have been resolved spun out of control. Criminals who should have been caught easily got away, leading to complex and expensive manhunts. And I found myself called into my sergeant’s office for dressing-downs and poor performance reviews. I was on the edge of losing my job before I had even really started.

  There was also the culture shock. I had moved from Buxton, an unpretentious, pleasant little market town, to Allenton, a grim suburb of Derby, built from mile after mile of funereal post-war council blocks. It was impossible to tell where the grey of the concrete ended and the grey of the sky began. Allenton had the highest crime rate in the county, and from the distress calls we received at the station, the favourite pastime seemed to be domestic violence. I found myself called out over and over again to arrest my own neighbours, only to have to return home there later that evening.

  By now, Sam had moved out of her parents’ house and was living with a friend in Manchester, so I’d get to go and see her at weekends. But Sunday evening always meant sitting alone back at my digs in Allenton, dreading the cycle in to work the next day.

  But the most extreme culture shock didn’t come from the neighbourhood – it came from the police force itself.

  Very early in my training I was walking across our station car park with some guys from my team when we passed a dog-handler from the Canine Unit standing around with his giant Alsatian. Of course the dog surged forward, barking and straining at the lead. We all jumped back, but the handler, a white South African guy, just laughed and said ‘Oh don’t worry lads, I’ve trained him to only bite the nig-nogs.’ I was completely stunned. I had never heard anything like that before in my life. This was still the era of apartheid. Hearing that sentence, in that accent, from someone supposedly fighting on my own side, was nauseating. Even more disturbing was the fact that no one else in the group objected. Everyone just sort of giggled and walked on, accepting that this was just how things were.

  Of course there were good people in Derby, and they did a lot of important work. But just through sheer overwork, there was also a widespread atmosphere of cynicism, indifference and casual racism. From my very first days there, I’d see my superiors rolling their eyes as if the public were just irritating extra paperwork, or worse, fundamentally bad people.

  Perhaps unsurprisingly, as a department our statistics weren’t very good at all. With a slight change in the ‘just get through the day’ mentality, we could have done so much better – not that I was much help with my own bumbling.

  I had joined the police to fight the good fight, but I was beginning to realise that I had been very naïve. Now I was crashing hard against real life and the gritty practicalities of the job. When that dog-handler had dropped his ‘nig-nogs’ line, I hadn’t taken some sort of principled stand. I was unsure of myself, and conscious of being the new guy. I didn’t want to start calling out cops who’d been on the force for years. These were my new colleagues and superiors, so I kept my mouth shut and got on as best I could. But that didn’t feel right either. How did my own silence fit into that self-image as the guy fighting the good fight?

  I came to the verge of quitting many times. But somehow I knew that just couldn’t happen. I had joined the police to prove something to myself. I wasn’t going to walk away at the first sign of difficulty. There was always a little voice inside telling me to just grit my teeth, to get through it. It became a point of inner pride that no matter how bad things got, I could take it.

  But I also knew that I had to do something to improve the situation.

  ‘Listen Alex, do me a favour mate, I need to get smacked in the face.’

  ‘You fuckin’ what?’ Alex looked at me like I’d lost my mind.

  ‘Look, I can’t keep up here – take me down the gym and teach me some boxing. I need to know how to take a punch. Come on mate, help me out.’

  Alex was one of the other recruits who had joined up with me. He was also a talented boxer who had won silver in the Amateurs. I figured this was as good a place to start as any.

  The gym was basically a converted garage with a few heavy bags, some Sugar Ray Leonard posters and the smell of stale sweat, but my wish came true – I definitely learned how to take a punch. It was hard going at first, but I was keen and fairly physically fit, a
nd eventually became quite a handy long-range counterpuncher.

  The boxing definitely helped my confidence in general, but the improvement in my working life was slow. Halfway through my two-year probation period it was still the same old story: ‘Woods, you’re with Sergeant Hornby this month,’ ‘Woods, why don’t you go with Sergeant Picknett for a bit.’ I didn’t need to be a genius to tell that officers were trying to palm me off on one another. I was hanging on by a thread.

  Eventually, I was transferred to Sergeant James McCarthy, an older Scottish officer who spoke with a gentle Perthshire lilt. It was McCarthy who first saw something in me. He recognised, well before I did, that I actually might have something to bring to the job. Gradually, he helped me learn to play to my strengths.

  I found my stride in the interview room. I discovered I had a talent for extracting confessions from suspects, even hardened criminals who had faced down much more experienced officers.

  I could read people. That little flicker of the eye; the way they tapped their foot a little faster when they were getting angry; the little bead of sweat that formed on their forehead as they got nervous or were caught in a lie. Squeezing confessions is a massively useful skill in the police force. If you can convince a criminal to confess at the interview stage, you save everyone the time and expense of a lengthy investigation and trial.

  Over time, detectives from CID actually started coming up and saying things like ‘Bloody hell, are you the one who got a confession out of that bloke? Well done mate, we’ve been trying to crack him for years.’ None of my colleagues in uniform seemed to notice – to them police work just meant making arrests and banging heads together. But it was the CID guys that I really looked up to. If I had a future on the force, I already knew it lay in that direction.

  I became Sergeant McCarthy’s go-to guy for suspect interviews and witness statements. My detection rate actually grew to become one of the best on the squad.