Some ex-detectives get an allotment. Liam investigates barbershops. He isn’t a policeman anymore, but old habits apparently die hard. For eight years, he worked undercover, posing as a junkie to score 20 quid deals of crack and heroin. The baggies are gone now, but Liam is still as inquisitive as ever. “Did you see the Turkish barbershop as you drove in?” he asks, shaking his head. “They must charge 500 quid for a short back and sides. I did a Companies House check: they turned over half a million last year.”
The place he’s talking about isn’t Turkish — nor is it much of a hairdresser. But it is almost certainly laundering drug money. Most UK high streets have similar barbershops, or nail bars, or mysteriously diner-free restaurants. Speaking under a pseudonym, Liam meets me not on a gritty housing estate, but in rural Hampshire, in a village with a green and a coaching inn. It’s hard to think of a better example of modern British drug dealing, of county lines stretching right across the nation.
The phenomenon has usually been depicted as an invasion of urban street gangs, trafficking narcotics to far-flung provinces. These days, though, the model has evolved, “growing arms and legs” as we used to say on the force. Dealers once ran drugs from their city redoubts. Now they’ve moved the business model into local communities. With the dealers, of course, comes misery: eye-watering violence, yes, but also innocents pressured by gangs into ruining their lives. It demonstrates how buyers are complicit in the suffering of others — and how even law-abiding Brits now struggle to escape the chaos, as disorder creeps from London estates to the leafy Home Counties.
The most obvious way of understanding Britain’s drug problem is by the numbers. Official statistics put the annual value of the country’s narcotics market at £10 billion, even as drug-related crime costs about the same again. This is before you consider the wider culture of drugs. Our national appetite for narcotics is insatiable. Gak. White. Chop. Chisel. Luca. Drugs permeate our society, like needles in an addict’s arm. A new Danny Dyer movie is called Marching Powder, for fuck’s sake. Apparently it’s a romantic comedy.
Then there are the gangs themselves, bewildering in their variety. Somali gangs from southeast London traditionally ran drugs down to Kent, from Mogadishu to Margate if you will. All the while, Albanian and Turkish gangs from north and east London work Hertfordshire and Essex; west Londoners, mainly Afro-Caribbean, take Hampshire, Berkshire and Surrey. As those Home Counties names imply, this is a business that long ago transcended its urban roots. One year, a detective told me, the biggest post-Carnival party happened in that famous west London neighbourhood — Basingstoke.
Given this ubiquity, across the southeast and beyond, it’s perhaps unsurprising that Britain’s drug trade happens more or less openly, clear enough when I swing by that barbershop in Hampshire. It’s a sepia-coloured, dusty sort of place. Quiet. The sign looks amateurish. A young woman appears in the doorway, smoking a cigarette and checking her phone. She looks up and down the street, then disappears back inside.
The obviousness of the façade is almost comical, even as these places are the terminus of the whole business. Cash-only, high turnover businesses like barbershops are ideal places for laundering money. Some of the proceeds of drug-dealing enters the cash register dirty, coming out the other end as clean as a head of freshly washed hair. They are quickly set up and closed as necessary. And, in quiet rural communities, they can hide in plain sight.
At the other end of the funnel are mostly North African and Albanian mafias, importing drugs through corruption-addled ports like Rotterdam and Le Havre. Drugs are smuggled in lorries, cars and even body-packed. They come in on cargo ships, yachts and barges. The ingenuity of the smugglers is driven by profit and demand. These networks are violent and determined, prepared to murder judges, journalists and politicians. Parts of the Low Countries increasingly resemble soggier analogues of Juarez.
Then there’s the middle-market, the retailers, who brazenly use social media to plug their wares. They offer cheap drugs as tasters, to get users hooked. They also offer ubiquity and ease of supply. Cocaine dealers will always promise the best stuff, even though it’s often heavily cut.
For low-level dealers and for many users, this is basically victimless crime. The punters crave and the market provides. They’re wrong. Liam mentions an operation where a teenage runner kept hassling him to score cannabis. Liam wasn’t interested — he was after Class A drugs — but made the buy to get the kid off his back. When the police raided the teen’s house, they found a Kalashnikov in his bedroom. “People fail to appreciate how young they are,” one officer tells me. “These kids literally have nothing. They join gangs for a new pair of trainers.” The lines have swallowed an entire generation of underclass children, lost boys and girls disappearing into an underbelly of near-Victorian squalor.
If you know where to look, there’s even worse here too. Another detective once told me about a North London drugs line operating in semi-rural Scotland. A local dealer “skanked” the gang out of £200. To set an example, London gang members forced him to have sex with a dog. At gunpoint. This isn’t an Irvine Welsh novel. This is real life.
All the while, dealers and runners bully vulnerable people into surrendering their homes to use as bases of operations — a practice known as “cuckooing”. This remains a hidden crime, far from the stereotypical Top Boy world of street gangs, zombie knives and drill music. It is, however, as crucial to the whole business model as those deserted rural barbers. Among other things, cuckooing offers cheap, discreet accommodation. It also provides a steady source of slave labour.
To understand how cuckooing works, I visit Catalyst Support. A charity supporting victims, it’s based in Woking, a commuter town off the M25. Hardly the hood — but Surrey is county lines turf now. Nick, a veteran caseworker, has the air of a man who’s seen and heard it all.
“We had one client coerced into moving county line gang members into his elderly parent’s house,” he tells me. “They ended up using the place to store and deal drugs.” Age seems to be no barrier to falling victim to cuckooing. In fact, middle-aged and older people, especially those with learning difficulties, are especially vulnerable.
Catalyst Support can offer assistance, but one theme is grimly familiar. As Nick says of another cuckooing case, which took place in a small English village, “it was obvious. A vulnerable person, living alone, suddenly has loads of new visitors? Yet none of the neighbours said a thing.” I can’t help but think of Liam’s barbershop, and how drugs are a “crime accelerator” prompting other types of offending. I’m thinking here of a spate of cashpoint thefts plaguing quiet service stations, gangs using gas tanks to blast ATMs from garage walls.
There are victories. The charity assisted the Home Office and other public bodies to formulate legislation that will make cuckooing a specific criminal offence. That’s progress, especially when victims are sometimes offenders too. Making it a specific crime, the charity suggests, helps clarify the status of cuckooing victims. Still, issues remain. Cuts often hit preventative services like Catalyst Support. Then there’s the perennial bane of third-sector organisations: performance indicators used to justify funding. Whitehall targets are often aimed at eye-catching problems like knife crime, rather than the hard yards of crimes like cuckooing.
The police have responded too: mapping gangs, markets and trafficking routes. In law enforcement vernacular, this is “Level Two” cross-border crime under the National Intelligence Model. Chief officers love theoretical models. They offer an illusion of control, despite highlighting the essentially parochial nature of UK forces. Criminals, it goes without saying, don’t recognise borders. But the cops? The border between Orpington and Swanley — marking where the Met gives way to Kent Police — once resembled the 38th Parallel.
This was a weakness gangs took advantage of, until police changed tactics. They formed cross-border task forces, to proactively target offenders. Even so, austerity-decimated local constabularies often found operations too time-consuming and resource-intensive. By the time they caught up, the lines were dug in. To be fair, officers tell me, support from the centre has improved significantly. That’s especially true around identifying offenders from communications data.
Yet all the while, organised criminal groups have multiplied. This is partly due immigration patterns. For example, gangs from Sub-Saharan Africa are slowly replacing the Somalis who dominated southeast London a decade ago. Then there are settled ethnic gangs from Eastern Europe, who’ve been in the UK for decades. Criminals also rely on refugees from war-torn nations: young men used to chaotic lifestyles involving violence. And, crucially, these gangs quickly cross-pollinate with local, white criminal groups in provinces outside the big cities. The county lines are a truly multinational, multicultural enterprise.
These new criminals are offering new products too. After the Taliban stymied heroin production in Afghanistan, the street price in Britain rocketed, leading to an increase in highly dangerous synthetic opioids from China. According to investigators, drugs like Nitazenes are the next big thing. Cheap to produce, and offering a fuzzy, heroin-like high, they offer a huge return on investment. If misused, they can also be very dangerous — Nitazenes can be 800 times as potent as the equivalent dose of morphine.
What hasn’t changed is the young age of offenders, both dealers and runners alike. Once ensnared, and subject to violence and sexual abuse, some became dealers themselves. “The question I’d ask,” one officer wonders, “is how did we get to this point? There’s a massive failure of parenting and education in the UK.”
I’m soon tempted to ask myself the same question. In another semi-rural town, this time in Surrey, I see another barbershop. Two kids in hoodies loiter outside a newsagents, like meerkats, their eyes scanning the streets for trouble. An Audi SUV is parked nearby, cannabis smoke bleeding from the semi-open, blacked-out windows. I’m not even looking for this stuff, but here it is. I wonder what the kids are thinking. In their minds, is this pretty village their corner? Their ends?
It’s impossible not to see this as a symptom of full-spectrum societal failure — and those kids are just the start. I’m reminded of the familiar argument: if you saw how meat pies were made, you’d never eat one. Perhaps well-heeled Surrey commuters, ordering their weekend baggies of poorly-cut cocaine, should set foot in a traphouse or watch a teenage runner bleed out on the pavement. In the lines business, that’s exactly how the pie is made. Yet this weekend alone, nearly 50 kilos of dirty powder are destined to hit London’s collective septum. For some reason, our opinion-forming and media classes rarely protest about that particular drug. Then again, they’ve probably never been cuckooed.
