Despair of the cathedral city terrorised by drug lords who use children as their mules
‘Cars park up, men on bikes arrive beside them, then disappear’
THE teenager who emerged from a park in Norwich in the early hours was in a pitiful state. ‘I’m dying,’ cried the youngster, who was bleeding heavily. ‘Someone help me, please.’
Moments earlier, families living opposite the popular wooded area, off West End Street, had been woken by the sound of gunfire and a car speeding away.
‘I was too scared to go out and help him,’ admitted a woman who saw the scene unfold from her bedroom window. ‘I’m a single mum with three children.’
The shooting a few weeks ago, police revealed, was the first time anyone in Norfolk had ever been injured from a firearm being discharged ‘in these circumstances’, an indication of just how safe Norwich used to be.
The brutal attack confirmed what detectives, councillors and residents knew perfectly well already: that the kind of violence and criminal activity normally associated with cities such as London, Manchester and Liverpool had spread to once sedate, law-abiding Norwich, almost on the edge of the Norfolk Broads.
Few details have emerged about the recent incident. The victim was 19 and came from London. He had been blasted in the back, it was reported (or rather, shot in the buttocks, according to our own inquiries).
Is this detail significant? Perhaps, because it may be a chilling clue to who was responsible.
Shooting someone in the buttocks (or slashing the buttocks with a knife) is a tactic employed by ‘county lines’ drug gangs to humiliate and ‘mark’ rivals or punish disloyalty. The perpetrators have a nickname for it: ‘bagging’ — a sickening reference to the fact that those wounded in this sadistic way sometimes need to be fitted with a colostomy bag.
Incongruously, Norfolk, perhaps more than any other area of the country, is engaged in a continuing war with these county lines gangs. The ruthless individuals who control the networks don’t live locally but are based in larger cities: many are at the other end of the M11, which links East Anglia to London.
Vulnerable teenagers, often in the care system, are used as ‘ mules’ to transport heroin and cocaine, by train or car, to Norwich and surrounding towns and villages — in other words, from a saturated urban drugs ‘marketplace’ to an untapped rural one where there are vast profits to be made.
At the heart of the operation are mobile phone numbers, the so-called county lines, which are circulated locally. Drugs are ordered in the same way you would ring for a pizza, and cut-price deals ensure there is no shortage of customers.
The new criminal phenomenon is having a devastating impact across Britain but especially in Norwich, which has an affluent professional class but also a burgeoning underclass.
It is the desperate and dispossessed who are mainly recruited to make drug deliveries, for money they could never hope to earn legitimately — or, in the case of young teenagers, sometimes for nothing more than a new pair of trainers.
Police admit that trying to tackle the threat is like cutting a head off the mythical serpent Hydra. As soon as one county line is closed down, another springs up.
In the past month alone, 25 county-line dealers have been jailed at Norwich Crown Court — no one believes they are the main players — and since 2016 more than 700 people suspected of county-lines involvement have been arrested in Norfolk, which is famed for its unspoilt lakes, beaches and wildlife. The writer Virginia Woolf called it ‘one of the most beautiful of counties’.
The effect is corrosive. Parks have become meeting places for dealers and addicts, needles have been discarded in children’s sandpits, youngsters are approached on the way home from school by gang figures in vehicles with blacked-out windows who are eager to recruit
them, and violence and intimidation have spread.
Almost every part of the city (population 213,000) has been affected by county lines.
The shooting took place north of the city centre, near the awardwinning Fat Cat pub, which is popular with real-ale aficionados. It is near the ‘ golden triangle’ where Norwich’s most handsome period properties, some worth more than £600,000, are found.
Sitting in the kitchen of one such elegant Georgian townhouse is a woman who runs a successful business from home. She does not wish to give her name, but she is part of a WhatsApp online messaging group called ‘ Drugwatch’, formed with her neighbours to share intelligence about drug-dealing in the area.
‘Cars park up, young men on bicycles pull up alongside, then disappear,’ she said.
On her smartphone is a telling WhatsApp log for a few days in the summer when ‘activity’ was at its height. The log begins at 09.47: ‘ Dealer in silver sports [car] sitting waiting on **** Street.’ 11.43: ‘Police arresting the dealer I saw this morning collect the drugs.’ 18.52: ‘Chap outside **** St waiting for someone.
‘ Kept checking phone. Looked dodgy.’
The scale of drug- dealing has declined because of the police response and the vigilance of residents. But the woman who started the WhatsApp group, has had enough.
‘She lives near the lane where most of the drug- dealing is concentrated,’ said the businesswoman. ‘She has sold her home. It has been really upsetting for her.’
A knife was recently dumped in a garden in one of the most desirable addresses in the ‘golden triangle’. The owner said he has given a statement to police and may be called to give evidence in a forthcoming trial.
In May, a man ran into the pharmacy in a parade of shops opposite Jenny Lind Park, just around the corner. He wanted help for his friend, who had taken drugs in the park toilets and passed out.
‘We went to see what we could do,’ said Maziar Moaddabi, who runs the pharmacy. An ambulance was called and the man’s friend recovered. The police gave Mr Moadabbi a special telephone number, not generally available to the public, as a precaution. ‘They will arrive very quickly if I need them,’ he said.
The parade has become a wellknown drug-dealing haunt. Claire Warnes, a sales assistant at one store, is confronted with the reality of the drugs trade almost every day.
‘That’s where they ring up for the drugs,’ she said, pointing to a phone box nearby. ‘You can hear them ordering the stuff.’
Then there are the teenagers used as runners to deliver the drugs, which are handed over to them from cars.
‘Sometimes I feel unsafe when lots of them come into the shop,’ said Miss Warnes. ‘They think they’re invisible.’ Many of them, she says, have been caught stealing on CCTV.
The transformation of Norwich is reflected in another set of figures. Of the 135 people who died as a result of drug misuse in Norfolk between 2015 and 2017, 45 were from Norwich, data from the Office for National Statistics shows.
The only other towns in the UK with a higher rate were Swansea, Port Talbot and Hartlepool.
Nowhere is the dark side of Norwich more obvious than in Chapelfield Gardens in the city centre, just yards from the Theatre Royal and upmarket shops and restaurants.
The gardens date from the 1880s and there is still a Victorian bandstand in the middle of them.
Did the park have a drugs problem, we asked a middle-aged resident who lives in a house overlooking the gardens.
‘Oh my God, yes,’ she replied. ‘This year has been the worst ever.’ She has even seen drug deals taking place on the bandstand. ‘It’s blatant,’ she said.
The kiosk, serving tea and refreshments, is where dealers often congregate. They are easy to spot, she says. They are young, some no more than 14 or 15, and all on pushbikes.
‘They talk like gangsters,’ said the resident. ‘ They’re all in the latest gear and fancy trainers. They have manbags stuffed with cash and show off by pulling out wads of cash when they pay.’
These youngsters are victims themselves. Many come from care homes and were sucked in by county-lines gangs, police told us.
One such teenager has just come before Norwich Crown Court. He was running his own county line called ‘Carlos’. And police have identified other county lines, each making around £5,000 a week, with names such as ‘Ninja’, ‘Rico’ and ‘Chris’.
This particular youngster, who was 17 and in foster care, was ‘heavily involved in dealing Class A drugs’, the court heard. He was jailed for two years and eight months after being caught by an undercover officer who first encountered him in Chapelfield Gardens in March.
On Wednesday last week, three boys were sitting on the back of a bench about 100yards from the café, smoking cannabis. ‘ They’re CID,’ they could be heard saying as we approached.
When they established that we weren’t police and got talking, it emerged that two of them were from children’s homes. They insisted they were not dealers. But they had no family to speak of.
Sadly, it is frighteningly easy to see why youngsters like this choose a ‘career’ in county lines.
Almost everyone we spoke to said Chapelfield Gardens was a haven not just for dealers but for addicts, who openly take crack cocaine and inject heroin.
‘ Many carry huge rucksacks because they live in shelters and have to take everything they own out with them every day,’ said county councillor Emma Corlett. ‘Their faces are covered in sores. Their eyes are sunken and their skin is pallid. But the people eating sandwiches and playing with their kids barely notice them now.’
What don’t go unnoticed, though, are discarded needles.
Horrified residents said these are sometimes left with the points sticking up, as if deliberately planted in the ground to cause injury. They have been found in
Used needles have been found in play areas ‘People have been beaten up with baseball bats’
Chapelfield Gardens, at the bottom of a nearby children’s slide and in a sandpit at the top of Silver Road.
In Norfolk, offences involving violence against the person rose from 8,294 in 2013 to 18,002 in 2017. This, police say, has been fuelled by increased drug activity resulting in ‘turf wars’ between rivals.
In Chapelfield Gardens, one man had his teeth knocked out by county-lines thugs for peddling cannabis.
‘People are scared,’ said Jane Watkin, a beauty therapist who chairs the newly formed Russell Street Community Area Residents Association. ‘People have been beaten up in the street with baseball bats and drug dealers are being arrested outside our front doors.’
Back near West End Street, the mother who heard the shooting recalls that the victim stumbled against her front door before staggering off down the road. ‘The door was wide open when I went downstairs,’ she said. ‘His weight must have forced it off the lock.’
Her 17-year-old daughter has some- thing to relate, too. One night a few months ago, she said, she was walking home with friends when a car pulled up alongside them. The driver asked if they knew where he could get weed [cannabis]. He also mentioned cocaine.
‘No,’ they replied. He then asked the two boys in her group if they could ‘do him a favour’ and suggested they go for a drive and ‘have a chat about how they could help him out’. They politely turned down the request and he drove off.
‘It was quite clear what he wanted them to do,’ the woman’s daughter said.