Any questions for this guy?
'I've done really bad things': The undercover cop who abandoned the war on drugs
"Walking beside me through a market town centre is a lean, healthy, 46-year-old man. “So, you wanted me to show you how I used to look?” He draws in his stomach, rounds his shoulders, paws imaginary sweat from his cheeks, and suddenly I’m looking at a junkie – jumpy, wheedling, begging for a fix. “And this is how you walk when you’re going to score heroin.” Subtly hunched over a sunken midriff, he strides ahead, as fast as he can without breaking into a run. “It’s all in the stomach,” he grins when I’ve caught up. “It’s all about stomach cramps.”
For 14 years, Neil Woods would leave behind his wife and two young children, put on stained “charity-shop scally tracksuit bottoms”, and turn up in a town somewhere in England as a drug addict. “I was a sponge for colloquialisms and mannerisms. Street slang is very regionalised, even just specific to a town, so you have to adapt quite quickly. The biggest danger at the start of any job is that you’ve landed from Mars – and who are you?” Using a new cover story each time, the undercover drugs squad officer would gradually befriend destitute addicts, ingratiate himself with their dealers, buy drugs from them – and then have the whole lot sent to jail.
It’s a struggle to reconcile the faux junkie Woods used to be with the articulate ex-policeman taking me for tea and cakes. “Oh, but I loved the art of deception,” he offers. “And I loved the development of the skill. It’s a great thrill to be able to successfully deceive people. Particularly when it’s dangerous.” The dangers grew every year, as dealers cottoned on to undercover police tactics, and grew increasingly suspicious of a new face asking for drugs. One dealer tried to run Woods over, another held a knife to his groin, another pulled a 9mm Glock handgun on him. But the commendation awards kept piling up. Woods even helped formulate national guidelines for undercover operations, and trained officers all over the country in his skills. By his calculation, he consigned drug offenders to more than 1,000 years behind bars.
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He did feel guilty about jailing the hapless addicts who led him to the dealers. “But I told myself I was fighting the good fight, and that the ends justified the means.” This moral justification seemed more compelling with each new assignment, due to the ever-escalating violence deployed by dealers to deter communities from talking to the police. In Northampton, Woods discovered a chilling new punishment for informants – gang rape of a girlfriend or sister – and every heroin addict in Brighton warned him that if the local dealers thought he had talked, the next hit of heroin he bought would kill him. Woods had wondered why heroin fatalities in Brighton were five times the national average. This wasn’t an overdose epidemic, he realised, but dealers literally getting away with murder, making their victims’ deaths look like just another accidental overdose....
'I've done really bad things': The undercover cop who abandoned the war on drugs
"Walking beside me through a market town centre is a lean, healthy, 46-year-old man. “So, you wanted me to show you how I used to look?” He draws in his stomach, rounds his shoulders, paws imaginary sweat from his cheeks, and suddenly I’m looking at a junkie – jumpy, wheedling, begging for a fix. “And this is how you walk when you’re going to score heroin.” Subtly hunched over a sunken midriff, he strides ahead, as fast as he can without breaking into a run. “It’s all in the stomach,” he grins when I’ve caught up. “It’s all about stomach cramps.”
For 14 years, Neil Woods would leave behind his wife and two young children, put on stained “charity-shop scally tracksuit bottoms”, and turn up in a town somewhere in England as a drug addict. “I was a sponge for colloquialisms and mannerisms. Street slang is very regionalised, even just specific to a town, so you have to adapt quite quickly. The biggest danger at the start of any job is that you’ve landed from Mars – and who are you?” Using a new cover story each time, the undercover drugs squad officer would gradually befriend destitute addicts, ingratiate himself with their dealers, buy drugs from them – and then have the whole lot sent to jail.
It’s a struggle to reconcile the faux junkie Woods used to be with the articulate ex-policeman taking me for tea and cakes. “Oh, but I loved the art of deception,” he offers. “And I loved the development of the skill. It’s a great thrill to be able to successfully deceive people. Particularly when it’s dangerous.” The dangers grew every year, as dealers cottoned on to undercover police tactics, and grew increasingly suspicious of a new face asking for drugs. One dealer tried to run Woods over, another held a knife to his groin, another pulled a 9mm Glock handgun on him. But the commendation awards kept piling up. Woods even helped formulate national guidelines for undercover operations, and trained officers all over the country in his skills. By his calculation, he consigned drug offenders to more than 1,000 years behind bars.
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He did feel guilty about jailing the hapless addicts who led him to the dealers. “But I told myself I was fighting the good fight, and that the ends justified the means.” This moral justification seemed more compelling with each new assignment, due to the ever-escalating violence deployed by dealers to deter communities from talking to the police. In Northampton, Woods discovered a chilling new punishment for informants – gang rape of a girlfriend or sister – and every heroin addict in Brighton warned him that if the local dealers thought he had talked, the next hit of heroin he bought would kill him. Woods had wondered why heroin fatalities in Brighton were five times the national average. This wasn’t an overdose epidemic, he realised, but dealers literally getting away with murder, making their victims’ deaths look like just another accidental overdose....
