HOW COPS INFILTRATED CRIME TO SMASH CITY
A HEROIN deal is a brutally simple transaction – hand over £10, and in return a dealer will destroy your life. It is a wretched and ruthless business that blights lives and communities.
A lucrative business for those at the top, gangs are able to generate thousands of pounds a day in revenue.
The addict on the street is at the end of a chain of dealers, traffickers, couriers, money-launderers and fixers controlled by criminal gangs – and it is those gangs that police in Swansea set out to take down.
Swansea, in common with many other coastal towns that have been struggling economically, has a longstanding drugs problem – it’s almost a decade since the hard-hitting film Swansea Love Story highlighted the problem.
In recent years police in Swansea have became aware of a new threat – drugs gangs from outside the area, particularly from big English cities such as Liverpool and London, extending their operations into the city.
It was this threat that Operation Blue Thames was designed to combat.
The criminals targeting Swansea were operating using a method known as “county lines”, which sees gangs from large cities moving into smaller cities and seaside towns around the UK.
Typically the gang identifies vulnerable, often drug-addicted, people to exploit in their target town.
Through intimidation, debt, or occasionally sexual violence or exploitation, the gang takes over their properties and uses them as bases to operate from, and as “stash houses” for stocks of drugs.
This part of the operation is known as “cuckooing”, after the bird which lays its eggs in other birds’ nests.
The keys to the county lines operation are simple pay-as-you-go mobile phones. The mobile number is distributed to users and addicts, and essentially becomes the “brand” of the gang. Users call it to place orders and dealers let the buyers know what drugs are available.
Typically the phone is controlled by a small number of trusted members of the gang further up the chain of command.
Once an order has been placed on the phone, other members of the gang, who are usually recruited locally, are dispatched to carry out the transaction. The addicts and the suppliers meet at an agreed point to complete the deal.
The stash houses are resupplied by gang members from their big-city bases either by car – often rented from one of the big hire companies – or public transport, while vulnerable children or young people are often used to act as mules and couriers.
Gangs have also been known to traffic people to their target towns, and to use them as mobile drug stocks, storing the drugs inside their bodies – a technique that goes by the self-explanatory name “plugging”.
For those at the top of the gangs the county line method allows them to exploit new markets in areas where they are not well-known to local police, while also maintaining an arm’s-length distance from the street dealing.
For the same reasons, the system poses challenges for police forces in the target towns.
It was just these kind of operations that police in Swansea set out to break in 2017. And the investigation would eventually result in 46 people being jailed for a total of more an 180 years.
The operation revolved around two police officers who went undercover in Swansea and immersed themselves in the drug community – they assumed the names Matt and Louise for their lives on the streets.
Police have refused to talk about the work of the officers – perhaps understandably – but their activities were to prove crucial. From the resulting court cases it is possible to piece together a picture of how they worked.
After a period of intelligence gathering, Matt and Louise were deployed and during 2017 began to develop contacts on the streets of Swansea, and to acquire the numbers – the lines – of various gangs who were operating in the city.
Once they had the numbers the undercover officers would then place orders on the lines, arrange rendezvous, and buy drugs from the streetdealers.
Many of the gangs used the same terminology – “dark” for heroin and “light” or “white” for crack cocaine – but some had more usual code words, with one using “W” for crack and “brandy” for heroin.
The gangs would also use the mobile phones to send out advertising text messages – often bulk texts to hundreds of potential buyers – to let users know when new stocks arrived or there were special offers available.
Eventually police were able to identify 10 different lines being used by dealers in the city, the detectives giving them code names such as Montana, Jack Calvin, Capo, PK Johnny, Flash and Newport Josh.
Typically once an officer placed an order, he or she would be directed to a meeting point in the city – once there the undercover cop would make another call, and be directed to the nearby deal-point. Popular dealmaking locations included Neath Road in Hafod, the nearby Cwm Level Road, the streets around Rosehill Quarry and Constitution Hill in Mount Pleasant, near the shops in Gors Avenue in Townhill, and behind the Argos store in the city centre.
Once the officer was at the rendezvous point the dealer would arrive shortly after – usually by car, sometimes by bicycle or on foot – with the drugs, and the transaction completed.
Such was the volume of business the gangs were doing that often a number of addicts would be told to meet at the same point at the same time so dealers could supply them all in one drop.
Once the deals were done the money would be passed back up the chain of gang members.
Slowly, over months, the undercover officers completed dozens of such deals using a host of different drugs lines, and detectives were able to begin piecing together the gang structures and roles – the low-level street dealer-addicts, the couriers, the middlemen, the people providing properties or transport, those trafficking the drugs into Swansea.
Once police had the phone numbers of gangs they were then able to track the movements of the mobiles using “site cell analysis” – pin-pointing the geographic location of phones when texts or calls were made or received using data from the networks – and the locations, times and movements of the phones were then matched with movements of cars or members of the gang.
It was a laborious process, but gradually detectives were able to build-up a picture of how each gang operated. And then the arrest phase began. During October and November last year dozens of raids took place at houses and flats across Swansea, Neath and Port Talbot, as well as fur-