Calais.
Ultra cautious smugglers can remove themselves even further from the dirty end of the business, by shipping drugs into the country in hollowed-out wooden elephants from India, inside drums from Africa, or even by impregnating postcards and airmail letters with LSD microdots.
But Ronnie Laing had progressed way beyond such ruses, and when he wanted a delivery he had heroin or cocaine or cannabis or any combination of the three shipped in from the Continent and collected at any of a 83 thousand possible landing places scattered around Britain's 7,000 miles of coastline and driven back to London.
Customs and Excise have seven coastal cutters to patrol those 7,000 miles of beaches, coves and cliffs so a smuggler has more chance of winning the pools than he has of bumping into the boys in blue, and chances are that the drugs ship can outperform the cutter and its volunteer crew without breaking into a sweat.
Any captures are usually the result of intelligence work rather than diligent patrolling, so a professional team has few problems in getting through. And if the smugglers are unlucky enough to meet a cutter they can't run away from, then the consignment is simply pitched overboard and collected later. Ronnie Laing was sitting pretty, or at least he was until he was hit on two fronts, from North and South America.
The land of the brave and the home of the free has a drugs business worth some hundred billion dollars a year, about the same as the whole Federal budget. Cocaine is now a growth industry with twelve million men and women using it regularly and 5,000 new addicts created every day. Supplies were rushed into the country to meet the everincreasing demand but, as usual, the free market system created a surplus.
If it were wheat, or oil, or Coke with a big 'C', then it would probably have been sold off cheaply to the Russians, but they wouldn't touch capitalist drugs with a cattle prod. So with the North American market pretty well saturated, in fact stoned out of its twelve million tiny minds, and with street prices falling, it wasn't too long before the drugs bosses looked towards Europe, and to Britain in particular.
In America drugs mean Mafia, and in Britain Mafia means trouble and Ronnie Laing was gradually squeezed out. And just to prove that it's always darkest just before it goes pitch black, the villains who actually export the drug, the South American cocaine barons, mostly Colombians,
decided they would deal directly with Britain and cut out the middle-men and they make the Mafia look like disorganized boy scouts. The Mafia might issue a contract for a killing, the Colombians don't even bother to write a memo. They just get the job done and worry about the paperwork later.
They're highly organized and, with the South American?s disregard for human life other than his own, frantically vicious. Laing found himself with a smaller and smaller share of the London drugs cake and eventually he was left with the crumbs, which is about the time he met up with Kyle and decided to put his not inconsiderable fortune to a more, but only slightly more, legitimate use.
The phone call from Tony was short and to the point, the conversation of a man used to speaking on lines which are bugged. He told me where and when he wanted to meet, but gave no hint as to the why. 'Just be there,' he'd said. 'And come alone.'
The where was St James's Park, the when was five minutes after I climbed out of the Granada opposite Horse Guards Parade, the wind tugging at the coats of the two policemen stopping non-permit-holders from parking outside the barracks. The coming alone was no problem because I gave McKinley the rest of the day off and told him to meet me at the flat the following morning.
Big Ben chimed in the background as I walked along the path to the lake which bisects the park, past the concrete snack bar that's a scaled down version of Liverpool Cathedral, the modern one, not the pretty one. Pigeons, geese and
Ultra cautious smugglers can remove themselves even further from the dirty end of the business, by shipping drugs into the country in hollowed-out wooden elephants from India, inside drums from Africa, or even by impregnating postcards and airmail letters with LSD microdots.
But Ronnie Laing had progressed way beyond such ruses, and when he wanted a delivery he had heroin or cocaine or cannabis or any combination of the three shipped in from the Continent and collected at any of a 83 thousand possible landing places scattered around Britain's 7,000 miles of coastline and driven back to London.
Customs and Excise have seven coastal cutters to patrol those 7,000 miles of beaches, coves and cliffs so a smuggler has more chance of winning the pools than he has of bumping into the boys in blue, and chances are that the drugs ship can outperform the cutter and its volunteer crew without breaking into a sweat.
Any captures are usually the result of intelligence work rather than diligent patrolling, so a professional team has few problems in getting through. And if the smugglers are unlucky enough to meet a cutter they can't run away from, then the consignment is simply pitched overboard and collected later. Ronnie Laing was sitting pretty, or at least he was until he was hit on two fronts, from North and South America.
The land of the brave and the home of the free has a drugs business worth some hundred billion dollars a year, about the same as the whole Federal budget. Cocaine is now a growth industry with twelve million men and women using it regularly and 5,000 new addicts created every day. Supplies were rushed into the country to meet the everincreasing demand but, as usual, the free market system created a surplus.
If it were wheat, or oil, or Coke with a big 'C', then it would probably have been sold off cheaply to the Russians, but they wouldn't touch capitalist drugs with a cattle prod. So with the North American market pretty well saturated, in fact stoned out of its twelve million tiny minds, and with street prices falling, it wasn't too long before the drugs bosses looked towards Europe, and to Britain in particular.
In America drugs mean Mafia, and in Britain Mafia means trouble and Ronnie Laing was gradually squeezed out. And just to prove that it's always darkest just before it goes pitch black, the villains who actually export the drug, the South American cocaine barons, mostly Colombians,
decided they would deal directly with Britain and cut out the middle-men and they make the Mafia look like disorganized boy scouts. The Mafia might issue a contract for a killing, the Colombians don't even bother to write a memo. They just get the job done and worry about the paperwork later.
They're highly organized and, with the South American?s disregard for human life other than his own, frantically vicious. Laing found himself with a smaller and smaller share of the London drugs cake and eventually he was left with the crumbs, which is about the time he met up with Kyle and decided to put his not inconsiderable fortune to a more, but only slightly more, legitimate use.
The phone call from Tony was short and to the point, the conversation of a man used to speaking on lines which are bugged. He told me where and when he wanted to meet, but gave no hint as to the why. 'Just be there,' he'd said. 'And come alone.'
The where was St James's Park, the when was five minutes after I climbed out of the Granada opposite Horse Guards Parade, the wind tugging at the coats of the two policemen stopping non-permit-holders from parking outside the barracks. The coming alone was no problem because I gave McKinley the rest of the day off and told him to meet me at the flat the following morning.
Big Ben chimed in the background as I walked along the path to the lake which bisects the park, past the concrete snack bar that's a scaled down version of Liverpool Cathedral, the modern one, not the pretty one. Pigeons, geese and
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