The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - The Telegraph Magazine
It’s a sunny Wednesday afternoon
in Swansea and in a hotel car park a dozen heroin and crack cocaine users are waiting for a delivery of drugs. They look the part: among them are a thin man in his early 20s wearing a blue T-shirt that reveals razor-blade scars on his forearms, talking to an older woman with sallow skin and a swollen face, a sleeping bag at their feet.
A blue BMW pulls up – the dealer has arrived. But only four users can scramble into the car. It drives 100 yards down the road before pausing to allow them to climb out, the deal done, before it heads off at speed.
What is not clear to anyone witnessing this depressing urban spectacle is that it represents a worrying trend in the sale of heroin and crack cocaine: the so-called ‘county lines’ operation. Inside the BMW is drug dealer Reece*. He is from west London, as are the young teenagers he is housing in the nearby flat where the drugs are prepared for sale. Why are they hundreds of miles from home? Because the UK’S biggest drug gangs are increasingly switching their focus from London and the UK’S other major cities to towns and smaller cities, such as Swansea, where prices and demand for hard drugs remain high, where there is less competition from other violent criminal groups – and where the children, sometimes as young as 12, that dealers take with them as foot soldiers are less likely to be traced.
According to the National Crime Agency (NCA), county lines are now used by hundreds of gangs, mainly from London, Liverpool, Birmingham and Manchester, to sell drugs all across England and Wales, from seaside towns in the south to beauty spots in the Cotswolds and the Lake District. In the year to November 2018, the NCA estimates that the number of county line operations in the UK increased from 720 to 1,500, while the charity Safer London believes that around 4,000 children from London alone, girls as well as boys, were being used to package, sell and deliver the drugs via county lines. As recently as last week, a 14-year-old boy in east London, Jayden Moodie, was knocked off his moped and fatally stabbed by three attackers who, it’s reported, may have been involved in county lines. Moodie’s family have repeatedly denied that he was involved in drug dealing. (The NCA’S annual report on county lines criminality is expected to be published by the end of this month.)
Last year, the authorities finally took steps to meet the growing threat of county lines – but what chance do the new measures have to stop evermore vulnerable children being preyed upon by drugs gangs to work in dangerous and criminal activities miles away from their families?
Sitting in the sunshine outside a café half an hour after his drugs sale, Reece sips a cappuccino and mulls over business, ignoring the constant ringing of his elderly Nokia phone on the table. After months of negotiations, I have been introduced to him by criminologist Dr Mohammed Qasim, a researcher at Leeds Beckett University, who has been studying British drug gangs for more than a decade and is investigating county lines in Wales.
An affable young black British man in his mid-20s with a ponytail, Reece is wearing a colourful American sports top and is matter of fact as he talks about recruiting children to sell his wares. Reece himself began selling drugs in London when he was 12. ‘Before I started selling, the older guys would buy us stuff from the shops. Give us weed. Buy us trainers,’ he says. ‘And then one guy gave me five bags of weed and told me to sell them for him. I came back in an hour with the money. He was impressed and it went on from there.’
Reece says the young people he exploits have no chance of success through legitimate means – and he offers them an opportunity to make money. Reece says he pays his young recruits £500 a month for packaging drugs, or in the region of £1,000 a month if they’re prepared to mete out violence on his behalf. ‘It’s easy to find kids to work for you,’ he says. ‘But it’s hard to find kids that will do things properly. Sometimes customers will test you by pulling a knife or something like that. You need to find kids with the right temperament.’
When a rival began dealing on his patch, Reece did not hesitate to order his recruits to attack him. ‘There was a lad from Tottenham who started operating [dealing drugs] in Swansea. He started threatening me on the phone,’ Reece says. ‘I got the kids to go with a baseball bat and knock him out. The kids are useless in some ways – but that’s something that they’re good for: the violence. I’m too old to be knocking people out or messing around with knives.’
Reece says most of the young people he approaches know about the money that can be made by leaving their home cities for smaller communities to sell drugs – a move that is referred to as ‘going country’, ‘going out there’ or ‘going OT’. ‘When I was young, it was going on to some degree, with some of the older guys going to Scotland to make money,’ says Reece. ‘Now it’s much bigger and everybody talks about it more. There is big money to be made for those who are willing to take the risk. There’s even rappers rapping about it.’
Reece prefers to recruit teenagers from the west London estate where he grew up – the local young boys, he says, haven’t the right temperament for the work. With a smooth-running team, he claims his county line brings in revenues of more than a £100,000 a month, much of which, according to Reece, goes to his business partners back in London or in prison.
He took over the Swansea line in December 2017, after his predecessor was
arrested. His youngest employee is currently 15 years old. ‘When I find the kids they are already committing violent crimes – but they aren’t really making any money. They’re not doing anything. Not going to school. At least they’ve got some money and some focus here,’ Reece tells me. ‘At home often they’ve got nothing and usually their parents aren’t looking out for them.’
Once Reece has recruited a child, he instals them in a flat in central Swansea and, as he sees it, gives them everything they might need. ‘Here the kids have got somewhere to live and food and free weed. I swear they smoke £60 in weed every day. And they eat Mcdonald’s three or four times a day.’