They Thought I Was Dead: Sandy’s Story

49 Jersey, Channel Islands, 2011

Drugs came into Jersey via planes, boats and the mail — fake Amazon parcels being favoured by some dealers. Nicos had a local Customs officer in his pocket, keeping him very sweet indeed with regular payments into a Panamanian bank account.

Panama was one of a decreasing number of countries in the world where you could open a bank account with no questions asked and, equally important, no replies given to questions from prying law enforcement agencies.

Sticking to his strict business maxim of keeping his friends close and his enemies closer, Alan Medcraft was as close as an enemy could be. Having obliged the Customs and Immigration officer by depositing, over the past few years, half a million pounds — and counting — into his Panamanian bank account, Nicos had enough on the guy to have him banged away in La Moye — the island’s prison — for much of the rest of the fifty-year-old’s active life.

‘Symbiotic!’ Nicos liked to announce whenever the man was in the apartment. ‘Alan and I have a symbiotic relationship.’

I think Nicos liked the sound of that word more than he actually understood what it meant. It was typical of the way he behaved generally, using brute reason instead of brute force — except with me, where it was usually the reverse.

He liked to invite Medcraft up to our apartment, and ply him with vintage whiskies and cognacs and fat Cuban cigars — which stank the apartment out for days. Although, to be honest, I didn’t mind that. It masked the smell, that seemed to be increasingly common, of the alien female perfume on Nicos. Although the fact that he had a lover — or maybe more than one — was fine by me if it meant he left me alone.

Medcraft was no dormouse. He was a good six foot tall, looked like he worked out, and could have given Nicos a beating if he chose to. He had a shaven head and a sly, slimy smile that said, in my interpretation, I’m corrupt as fuck. But try proving it!

He was an invaluable asset to Nicos, giving him intel on any particular operations the Customs and Immigration officers were carrying out, or what area they would be focusing on in the coming weeks. And even more importantly, diverting attention away from Nicos’s chosen supply route for his next big consignment. Sometimes that would be a drop from a light aircraft flown over from the south coast of England or the west coast of France, other times it would be a yacht out at sea with which Nicos would rendezvous in his own boat.

He once told me how that worked. He would take a briefcase full of cash, concealed inside a sailing bag, and meet the drugs yacht several miles offshore. Sometimes, Alan Medcraft would have prearranged a major operation on the other side of the island as a distraction.

Nicos had also let slip, whether from bravado, to impress me, or because he was genuinely nervous of them, that the people he met out at sea were not to be messed with. Anyone who crossed them never got a second chance. They were members of a violent Liverpool gang, controlled from his prison cell by its founder, Saul Brignell, who had direct links with one of the Colombian cartels. His gang distributed drugs in major quantities throughout the British Isles, via lorries, boats and helicopters. They boasted that no one who had ever crossed them was still alive.

Then Nicos told me he’d been offered the deal of a lifetime. A consignment of crystal meth, cocaine and heroin, available in a week’s time via a rendezvous at sea, with a street value in Jersey, when cut, of around £20 million. The deal was on offer to the first Jersey dealer who could come up with £1.2 million in cash.

Nicos told me he had that money. It was stashed in a secure storage unit near Brighton. But he’d been warned by Alan Medcraft that Jersey Customs and Immigration were mounting a major operation on both the private and commercial airports and the ferry port over the next month, and that he was very much on their radar.

Suddenly, behaving all sweetness and light to me for the first time in many months, Nicos asked me how I would feel about driving to Brighton and fetching the money.

Seriously, £1.2 million?

You have a new name, a new look, no one in the Brighton area is going to recognize you. I give you the security code and the two keys for my locker at the storage depot. You drive over on the ferry in your car — and they won’t be interested in you. Alan told me they are not targeting anyone with a Jersey licence plate. Anyone asks you why you’re going or why you’ve been to England — and they won’t — you just tell them it was for a funeral.

He hadn’t needed to try hard to convince me at all, I would have bitten his hand off for any chance to be away from him for a few days. And what he didn’t realize, because he was so wrapped up in his own greedy plans, was that this was perhaps a deal of a lifetime for me. This was my way out. Although I tried my best to look like I really needed to think about it, full of nerves and not in any way enthusiastic.

I had a bright red MX5 which I loved, and the idea of a few days blasting up English roads faster than the 40mph limit here in Jersey filled me with joy. And I was glad to be able to take Bruno with me, and get him away from Nicos.

My potential plan, which still needed some serious thought, was making me feel happy for the first time in a very long while.

One thing worried me: even though I knew I now looked totally different from Old Me, and I had a convincing passport as Sandra Jones, I was still pretty nervous about going anywhere near Brighton, just four years after leaving.

But the opportunity was too good to miss.

And I had that plan — rough, unformed, just a tiny germ at this stage, but a plan nonetheless. The opportunity to escape from Nicos, with Bruno, and start a new life. The gift he had inadvertently given us. People talk about all their Christmases coming at once. It was all my Christmases, all my birthdays and more, so much more.

A new life was something I had been craving even more than my next heroin fix. But as long as I was on heroin I was dependent on Nicos and knew I couldn’t leave him. I only had the chance to escape once, so I had to do it well.

And now there was good news on that front — or at least reasonable news. Since meeting with Dr Deryn Doyle, I’d been trying to wean myself off heroin, but the side effects were horrifying. I felt nauseous and vomited a lot, as well as having diarrhoea and agonizing stomach cramps. I constantly felt paranoid and was unable to sleep. I took to drinking more alcohol, but all that did was make my cravings for heroin stronger.

I thought I could come off the drugs through willpower alone, but I couldn’t, and now I really needed this to work and to do it without Nicos knowing. I went back to see Dr Doyle and she prescribed methadone, which would take away the craving without giving the amazing high of heroin. And it would also alleviate the withdrawal symptoms.

The journey of a thousand miles begins with the one step, I kept reminding myself. It would be a long, hard fight to freedom, but I had started it. I was on my way.

Through an anxious and uncertain facade, I told Nicos I would do it.