THE EMPIRE STRIKES BACK
Even in the 19th century organised crime and drug trafficking were a major challenge to law and order in the British Empire – as a new book reveals
IT IS fashionable to criticise our colonial past but the British Empire was at the forefront of fighting organised crime around the world for much of the last century. Some of the most extraordinary but least known heroes of empire are not soldiers and traders but policemen and crime-busters.
At its peak the British Empire ruled over 412 million people, nearly a quarter of the world’s population in the early 20th century. It was by far the largest empire the world has ever known and with it came responsibility for battling international crime gangs determined to exploit its global trade routes.
This very first war on drugs began when the British tried to do the right thing and tackle its opium exports but sometimes the best intentions can lead to the worst results.
When Britain took the moral high ground and agreed to end its lucrative export of opium from Imperial India to China in 1908 it unleashed a century of criminality. Just as America’s misguided Prohibition of alcohol made illicit fortunes for the mafia so organised crime within the British Empire grew rich on its trade in illegal narcotics in the 20th century.
Prime minister William Gladstone had predicted this would happen when he argued in Parliament (not long after the second Opium War ended in 1860) against the abolition of the imperial trade in opium. “An enormous contraband trade will grow,” he told wellmeaning Liberal politicians. “Does not my Honourable Friend see that, supposing he could stop the growth of opium in the whole Indian peninsula, his measure would immensely stimulate the growth of it in China?”
He was right and Chinese Triad gangsters seized on the gap in the market to sell opiates around the world. The price of narcotics rocketed in the wake of the First World War when Western governments woke up to the growing problem of addiction and made certain drugs illegal.
The imperial prohibition of opium trading caused great tension between the government in London and their colonial governors, who had to deal with the messy outcome of their good intentions. Chinese refugees fleeing civil war in the mainland presented a major problem to Sir Cecil Clementi, governor of Hong Kong in the 1920s. Faced with a shortfall of opium to meet the needs of thousands of new addicts he knew that something dramatic had to be done.
RATHER than seeing the opium trade fall into the hands of criminal smugglers Sir Cecil took the unconventional initiative of becoming a major dealer himself.
In defiance of the British government’s own anti-drugs stance Sir Cecil organised the purchase of large quantities of opium directly from Persia to dump on his home market and put the smugglers out of business. While he waited for official approval from London, Sir Cecil even entered into negotiations with other colonies to supply them with much sought after opium too.
It was an extraordinary experiment and Sir Cecil noted with delight the dramatic fall in opiumrelated crime in his own colony – but the Whitehall bureaucrats couldn’t put up with this for long and demanded he cease dealing.
If Britain had handed a great gift to organised crime it also took on the burden of pursuing the purveyors of this new evil. Principal among these innovative drugsbusting investigators was Russell Pasha, commandant of the Cairo police and founder of the Central Narcotics Intelligence Bureau. Seeing the damage caused by a new wave of opium-derived drugs, especially heroin, on the streets of the Egyptian capital he set about pulling together evidence of a vast international network linking East with West.
His agents exposed the opium fields guarded by narcotics warlords and tracked down the corrupt pharmaceutical companies in Western Europe happy to sell thousands of kilos of refined drugs to ruthless master criminals.
Russell shared his information with American Harry J Anslinger, first director of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics, later becoming the DEA, and together they pioneered the war on drugs across the globe.
Some of these gangsters even took the liberty of using the very weapons of imperial power – Her Majesty’s Royal Navy – to smuggle drugs from continent to continent. HMS Belfast, now a museum ship moored on the River Thames, was once packed with Triad narcotics from Hong Kong intended for distribution in America.
A shocking drugs bust in 1962 came when a sharp-eyed crewman noticed something not quite right with luggage belonging to a Chinese cook. “The case was locked at one end and padlocked that same end,” recalled the Belfast’s commander David Loram, “but lifting the other corner I saw it contained packages of white powder.”
Having got permission to open the case from the commander-inchief Far East, Loram opened it the next morning. “The case contained 20 bags of a brown substance and 25 bags of white powder. There was also a tin containing ground nuts with eight of the 20 bags packed round the nuts.”
The brown substance was quickly identified as raw opium and the white powder as heroin. When HMS Belfast arrived at Portsmouth three Chinese crewmen were escorted to London where they were charged with being in unlawful possession of opium and heroin. The combined illicit value of this cache was estimated at £325,000 – now worth millions.
“It is the biggest single haul of illicit drugs that has ever been made,” said the crown prosecutor. “It is a quantity far in excess of any illicit market which could be found in this country and there is no doubt that the majority of it, if not all, was destined for either South America or North America.”
BUT, one wonders, how much more opium and heroin had the Royal Navy safely transported around the world for the Triads?
Sometimes it was individual police officers who had to step up and confront the rampant organised crime around them. In Hong Kong, Insp Christopher Wallace agonised over the everyday corruption in the colony.
“I sometimes feel that it is all rather a bad dream,” he said. “Even if I leave this colony penniless and in disgrace at least I shall take my principles with me – and these are more precious to me than anything else.”
He felt compelled to write directly to the prime minister back in Britain. “There is a tremendous amount of money involved and this means that there is a great deal of power to back it up,” he told PM Sir Alec Douglas-Home. In the end he was forced to conduct his own drugs raids into the notorious Kowloon Walled City and started to arrest criminals without official approval.
This was too much for his superiors who transferred him to another division and ended his whistleblowing. But a decade later a major investigation revealed widespread corruption in the Hong Kong police and the lonely crusade of Insp Wallace was vindicated.
I have dedicated my book Empire Of Crime to “all the colonial police officers who put their lives on the line doing the right thing” and I hope it is a worthy memorial to them.
To pre-order Empire Of Crime by Tim Newark (Pen & Sword Books, £19.99, October 30) call the Express Bookshop with your debit/ credit card on 01872 562310. Alternatively send a cheque or PO payable to Express Bookshop to: Empire Offer, PO Box 200, Falmouth, Cornwall, TR11 4WJ or order on-line at expressbookshop.co.uk. UK delivery is free.