230: What if you discovered you were the enemy?
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This Is Actually Happening features real experiences that often include traumatic events. Please consult the show notes for specific content warnings on each episode and for more information about support services. It's just terror. It's just fear with no object. It's so purely guttural and instinctive. It's almost like the prey of a tiger that is giving its last kicks to try and stay alive. The moment that it knows it's about to be ripped apart, it's that moment of utter horror.

From Wondery, I'm Witt Misseldein. You are listening to This Is Actually Happening. Episode 230, What If You Discovered You Were the Enemy?

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I grew up in quite a sheltered place in the Peak District in Derbyshire, in the northwest of England. I was very happy growing up as a kid. I felt loved, although there was no hugs and kisses, but I still felt loved. And it was a calm environment, a nice home.

I was a quiet child, I suppose. I was geeky. You know, I was into my books and I was into Dungeons and Dragons and I was into music. So I used to sing in the choir. I used to sing in a heavy metal band with some friends. I was also very confident as well. I wasn't the shy and retiring type. I would quite happily go up and start a conversation with anybody. And I could be precocious as well if I so chose to be.

I suppose I got my confidence just from this fairly nurturing atmosphere that I had because I was always engaged and challenged in intellectual conversations with my father. We would always talk about what we're reading. We would always talk about politics and I would argue with him actually, but it was a very calm debating kind of argument. I was always taught by my parents, particularly my father, that everything can be sorted out by reason and you can reason with everybody.

And this is a principle from a very, very early age. And it's very nice in theory when you're in a very safe, extremely low crime town. You know, it sounds such a grand intellectual thing, but not everybody can be reasoned with. I think I had a very clear sort of education on morality and ethics and what exactly is good and evil.

I was an obsessive reader, absolutely obsessive. One of the types of books that I got really into, the sort of daring do of heroic heroes fighting for kingdom country. They talked in terms of honour and a strict code of honour. And that kind of thing, romanticised idea of striving for what's good, really seeped into my identity and what I valued. I had a very strong sense of duty and honour.

But none of that really influenced what I wanted to do in life because I never really knew what I wanted to do in life. So I found myself at the end of my sixth form, or I suppose you'd call it high school, I went to university and I found that I'd made a drastic mistake because when I was sat...

in that lecture theatre, listening to lectures about business studies, I thought, what on earth am I doing here? What on earth made me think that I had any interest in business? I was so bored by it. So bored. So I spent much of my time enjoying the party scene in Manchester, where I went to university. I ended up dropping out of university after a few months.

And then I had that big question, that sort of conversation with one's parents. All right, then what are you going to do? I had considered just touring around Europe. Some friends of mine had gone just on an adventure, you know, just getting odd jobs, fruit picking and travelling around Europe just to see the world. And that sounded exciting. It was excitement I found myself craving. And then I saw an advertisement for the police in our local newspaper saying,

So I just couldn't make my mind up. Should I apply for the police? Should I go backpacking? So I flipped a coin. I left my future to the fate of a tossed coin. It came up heads, which meant that I applied for the police. It's a really lengthy process to get into the police. The assessment process I sailed through because a lot of the assessments seem to be based around how you reason with people.

They would pit recruits against each other and then match them up so that they would debate with two people at a time and then three. And it was how you conducted yourself in those disagreements, so to speak. So it was my kind of test, really.

The process once you'd got in was that you alternated between proper classroom teaching and, you know, all of the broader training as well, you know, self-defense, learning the law. Three months initial training, then you went with a tutor on the streets for five months at a time. And I did okay when I was with my tutor, but as soon as I went out on my own, I realized just how sheltered I had been.

Because I had to learn the hard way that you can't reason with everybody. And you can try as hard as you want to try and reason with some people. They're still going to want to punch you in the face. This was new for me. I joined with somebody who was a qualified boxing instructor. And so I got him to teach me some boxing. Not so I could learn how to hit people. It's just so I could get used to being punched.

But the trouble is, I really was chalk to their cheese. And I was looked at with suspicion by many of my colleagues because most of them, they talked about football or soccer, as you'd call it in the States. That's what they talked about. And I remember one of them saying to me once, you don't like football? What do you mean? What do you talk about then? And he wasn't joking. That's what he said. If you don't like football, what do you talk about? Yes.

So it was already difficult to get to know them. But also, I wasn't very good at it. I was not a very good uniform cop. In fact, I was crap at it. I was the slowest learner. And that quickly becomes a bigger and bigger pressure. And if you're not trusted, then that quickly translates into bullying. So they didn't trust me to back them up because I wasn't like them and I was young and I wasn't very good at it. I just, I hated the job. I absolutely hated it.

But I refused to myself that I was going to give in and leave just to prove to myself that I could manage it. I struggled to deal with things like domestic abuse. I couldn't intuitively respond in terms of dealing with extremely aggressive men. There was one time, this guy, I'd already caught him for drink driving. So he knew me and he hated me.

And I was called to a domestic dispute between him and his wife. And it was just me. I was on foot. And I got there and he said, oh, it's you. It would be you, wouldn't it? There was blood on his shirt and his wife was screaming and crying in the kitchen. And he was holding a Stanley knife. And he looked at me in the eye and he cut his wrist with the Stanley knife.

Now, he didn't cut it that hard, but he cut it and there was blood coming out. And he says, right, you're next. And he started coming around after me. And in this living room, in this house, there was only one big sofa and a TV and nothing else. And the sofa was in the middle of the room.

All I could think to do was to step around the sofa. And so it was almost a comedy scene where he's walking around the sofa and getting increasingly fast. So we're just going like anti-clockwise around the sofa while he's waving the Stanley knife around. It just felt so comic. I just felt like I had no idea what to do. And then my backup arrived. So that was good. But the things like that, I felt quite clueless.

Good cops can be incredibly impressive when they do what they do, you know, and it certainly felt like I would never get to their standard. I got to my two years and things had just started to get easier and I was still considering leaving, but then I kept going for a bit longer and a bit longer. Before I knew it, I'd managed to change stations to somewhere completely different, which made it much easier because nobody knew me. They became easier so much that I got offered an attachment to the drug squad.

Now, this would be 1993, and it was very unusual and very strange for someone so young in service to get an attachment to the drug squad. And the reason that they were doing it is because we had the mother of all moral panics in the UK at that time about drugs. For years, our newspapers and our media had talked about how crack cocaine was destroying communities in America. And there was fear about the moment when crack cocaine would hit the streets of the UK.

So the moment that we did, suddenly there was a massive political pressure from the public about what to do about this scourge on our society as it was described. So there was suddenly pressure on chief constables to prove that they were doing something. And that meant that me as a rookie got an attachment to the drug squad.

The drug squad hated having us rookies underfoot because we didn't know what we were doing. But after just a couple of weeks, one of them looked at me strangely one day and said, do you fancy having a go at buying some crack cocaine? I found this a rather unexpected question, but I said, well, yeah, I'm game for anything.

And so I was given £20 and pointed to this door in this terraced house in the city of Derby. And I went to knock on the door. And this huge guy opened the door and he says, who are you? You're not a fucking student, are you? I hate students. So I thought to myself, well, that'll do. Yeah, that's right. I'm a student, I said. And this woman came out from behind him and said, what, is he stupid? You just told him you hate students. And he laughed and said, yeah, but what fool would actually admit to that?

So he was fine. He says, yeah, what do you want? And I said, I'll have a 20 pound stone of crack. And he gave me this little paper twist and I gave him the 20 quid. And then I walked back to the drug squad and holding up my little paper twist of crack and said, hey, look, I've got it. That day then defined the rest of my life, really, because that kind of low level undercover work hadn't happened in the UK.

And of course, the eyes lit up in the members of the drug squad because they were under pressure to get results. And suddenly there was a new method of doing so. When I started working undercover, I'd found something I was good at. And part of the reason for that is that when I got in scary positions, I got a reputation for a calm head. It meant that I got given some of the more dangerous troubleshooting operations as well, which put me more at risk.

One of the first times I was really had extreme fear was when I knocked on this door to buy heroin off this dealer in the city of Stoke that I'd been buying from for a few weeks. And he opened the door and put a samurai sword to my throat and said, you're drug squad. You're fucking drug squad, man. I honestly, the thought that went through my head was, well, I had a good run. You know, I thought I was going to die. But then a woman said, I thought he was going to say he was then. And they started laughing. They were actually joking. They were actually winding me up. They were joking.

I was quickly and regularly employed to do this kind of work and I was loaned out to other drug squads in other police forces. But of course, it was really, really easy that first time. Really easy because that chap did not know that there was a new tactic in town. He didn't know that there were police officers out there wanting to catch him in this way. So it was quite easy. But of course, he went to prison and quickly the word got out that the police had a new game.

So it became rapidly much more difficult. Quick buy and bust operations that started within a year were turned into quite complex and more long-term infiltration type operations. And that's what I did sort of six or seven months on or off for years and years. Colin Gunn was one of the main targets. He was the head of the Bestwood cartel.

Now, he'd introduced me to this lieutenant and he pulled up in a car and he brought his 12-year-old son with him. And he dressed his 12-year-old son in exactly the same way as him. They both had a shaved head. They both had identical tracksuits and identical trainers. This gangster basically interrogated me with a knife pressed into my groin while his son was watching. After a while, he agreed to sell to me and connect with me.

So the next day into the team and two of the backup team had gone off sick. We'd been working extraordinarily long hours and everyone was pretty frayed. So I was introduced to two new cops that I'd not met before. Met the first one, shook his hand, no problem with him. The second one shook his hand and the hairs just went up on the back of my neck. Instinctively, this guy was wrong.

I couldn't quite put it into words because this is more of a perception thing. This is about body language and subtleties. So I went to the boss, the senior investigating officer running the operation. And I said, look, boss, there is no way I can go out. There's no way I can have him in the briefing. I don't trust him. And he was great. He said, fine, no problem. We'll exclude them both. They don't know what they're coming into anyway. They don't know anything about it and they'll never know. And we'll just, we'll run short.

So I didn't think anything more about that. But sometime afterwards, it turned out that that cop I'd taken an exception to was an employee of Colin Gunn. So in true departed style, he'd managed to get an undercover closer to my operation than I'd got to his. And by the time I'd met him, he'd been in the police for seven years. He was paid £2,000 a month on top of his police wages, plus bonuses for good information.

In the debrief from that operation, I spoke to various senior cops, but one of them said to me, look, Woodsy, of course this happened. With this much money involved, how can it not happen? Drugs organised crime is so rich and so powerful, they can infiltrate anywhere. It became clear that corruption was a really major problem within the world of covert drugs policing. And one of the systems that was developed to try and fight against that was

If I was loaned to any constabulary, what they would have to do is they would have to have a system where police were handpicked and separated and not in contact at all with their normal police station or duties. So they would disappear themselves for the whole length of the operation, be in no contact with anybody.

Also, I would be loaned to that group and they would be given a lawful order right at the start of the operation that they were not allowed to ask me my real name or where I was from and that they would be disciplined, punished if they did. So I was using a pseudonym to the cops, the same pseudonym I was using to the gangsters. This actually made it quite a lonely experience. It also made it quite clear, because I understood the reasons for this, that I couldn't trust anybody.

I mean, that's why the systems were set up that way. Literally to protect me from corruption because we can't trust everybody. And it became a lonely, lonely place.

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So against that backdrop, I spent six months investigating these gangs in the area of Highfield in Leicester. And there were some competing, pretty vicious gangs. One of the main people, main targets from the operation, I'd actually bought a load of heroin from within the first few weeks. I'd got to know him really well.

But because early on in an investigation, you don't wear any secret cameras or recording equipment in case you get searched. We've got no corroborating evidence against him. So the job was coming almost to an end, but we didn't have the evidence on this one guy. And I'd been phoning him and phoning him saying, look, you know, you coming out to meet. But he wasn't hands on because he was actually a big player who didn't do hands on dealings.

So to tempt him out, I said, look, mate, I've got a load of counterfeit Stone Island jackets. And I reckon I know you love your clothes. Come out and buy these from me. So he says, yeah, all right, I'll have a look at that. So that's how I got him out just to get him on camera, just so I could say in evidence that that's the guy.

He turned up, though, with two of his mates, which is a problem. And we'd met in this really secluded car park. And he turned up and he says, oh, you just want to sell me these or do you want to buy some as well? You have to submit. And I said, well, if you carry him, why? You know, I'll have a 20 stone off you. So he got in his car and started cutting this tiny slither of crack off this massive block of crack. I mean, like it was bigger than a VHS tape box.

But the trouble is, his mates didn't know me. And one of them started asking me questions. And I'm trying to direct the answers to include the guy that I did know. I'd known him for months. But this guy was really suspicious of me. And he pushed me up against this metal railing and started feeling my clothes. When he felt down and looked at the button, and he saw the hole drilled in that metal button, and that little lens winking up at him, there was no doubt what he'd found. And I knew I was in the shit.

Now, one advantage that I had found and developed working undercover, which was one of the reasons I found myself being good at it, is the fact that when I was in an adrenaline situation, when I felt like I was about to get killed, and it had happened to me a few times by this point, I had the sensation that time was slowing down, that I had all the time in the world to think through this problem before me. Now, that's a very useful skill and a very heady experience.

So when he found that button, everything slowed down. And I thought to myself, I'm in the shit here. And what I've got to do is to slow down him convincing his two mates of what he's found, because that will give me time to get away and possibly survive this.

So I pushed him back slightly and said, what are you doing picking up my fucking clothes? What are you doing? It's not even my fucking jacket. I borrowed it from Jackie this morning. It's Jackie's jacket, isn't it? And I grabbed the Stone Island jacket from his mate and started slowly folding it and putting it back in its plastic cover really slowly as I kept up this torrent of abuse.

And I was really warming to this now. I just never let up this swearing, insulting him, saying, you fucking, you're just a wanker. What are you fucking doing? Picking at my fucking clothes. I do not exaggerate. This guy clearly just spends all day working in the gym and he's about six foot four. He looked stunned because obviously I was not behaving as he expected and he was clearly doubting himself. And then I just started slowly walking away from him, looking over my shoulder occasionally and not stopping shouting.

And he looked absolutely flabbergasted. And it worked because he wasn't telling his mates what he'd found. Then he starts shouting to his mate, saying, fucker, man, that's 5-0, that man's 5-0. He's 5-0, he's fucking heat. Kept walking, I kept shouting the abuse. And then suddenly I hear running footsteps behind me. I turn round and it's his mate, it's the one I know, who's been cutting up the crack in the car. And he said, don't mind my mate, he's a dickhead.

And I says, yeah, he is a dickhead, just picking at my clothes. It's not even my jacket. And he says, anyway, don't you want this ting? I thought to myself, you want to sell me crack now. So I said, right, OK, yeah. So I put my hand in my pocket, brought out 20 quid. And the handover was perfectly framed in the camera. His mate by this point is absolutely screaming at him, saying, man, I'm telling you, he's fucking 5-0. What are you doing? And I carried on walking anyway.

And then I hear the screech of tyres and the revving engine. He's obviously told him and managed to convince him about what he's found. So I'm thinking, no need to walk slowly now. And I legged it.

And I ran along the pavement. It came up to a roundabout junction. And just before that junction, there was a metal railing. So as I'm sprinting along the footpath, the car behind me mounted the walk behind me and was driving behind me trying to run me over. And I sprinted and I just managed to get to the metal railing where the car couldn't fit. And I glanced over as I got there and the car must have been no more than two metres behind me. So it was a very, very close shave indeed with very narrow margins.

I managed to get myself back to the safe location, the meeting point. And I told them what had happened. I told them the description and the registration of the car. And the Intel guy went out the room, came back a few minutes later when he'd run it through the computer. And he was laughing when he came back in the room. He says, I don't know why they didn't just shoot you because there's loads of intelligence. There's a gun in that car. And, you know, we all laughed at that. It seemed the funniest thing ever happened.

what he said at that point I was just in hysterics it's funny what you laugh at in that kind of scenario really but for me it was terrifying it was genuinely terrifying but the

The thing is, when I went back to my team and told them what had happened, they were all amazed. You know, why are you not a gibbering wreck? And how can you calmly write up your evidence? How can you describe this in such reasonable terms? And that made me question myself. You know, it made me think, well, what is it? How am I able to do that?

And one aspect of that is that I really enjoyed the fact that I was good at it. I really enjoyed that reputation amongst my peers. I liked the congratulations. You know, it suited my ego as a young man. You know, it's a really big boost when you find yourself considered brave. What also fed into that was my boyhood idea of a sense of duty, that this is my responsibility.

Because I am good at this, this is my responsibility and my duty to take these risks on behalf of society. And I really did think in those terms, because I can, then I should. I absolutely fell for the idea that I was fighting the good fight, that heroin and crack cocaine were behind so much crime and misery. And I thought that I was at the forefront of the answer to this problem.

That was part of that sense of duty that I was on the side of the good, on the side of the right.

I got married around the same time, actually, as when I started working undercover. I think it was 1993. And I had my first child in 1997, second in 1999. You know, when I was working undercover, I managed to spend quite a lot of time with him. You know, I could rearrange my days and I actually managed to quite often get home and take my kids swimming on a Sunday morning, which is a very strange oasis of normality and the chaos of life that I was experiencing quite often.

But those serene moments with the kids were very much helped me stay strong, actually. They were the calming moments, the reaffirming of what life is about moments that made me deal with some of the darker things that I was experiencing. One of the things that made me good at undercover work is the fact that I am a sponge and I have a very geeky approach to anything. You know, if I'm interested in it, I want to be good at it. I want to understand it as much as possible.

I did infiltrate drug gangs and I got to know the gangsters, but you put a lot of work in first in mingling with the vulnerable people in order to get to that point.

And so what I did is I used my empathy to understand all of the problematic drug users, the vulnerable people that I was manipulating. And I wanted to understand them as much as possible, to be as effective as possible. And whenever I started an operation, I would literally pick on the most vulnerable people to manipulate. Now, if that sounds ruthless, well, of course it's ruthless.

But that's the harsh reality of drugs policing. And it's certainly the reality of undercover work. Because the most vulnerable people, I could get them to do what I wanted. And also the most vulnerable people are using the most drugs, they have the most connections. So I would use my empathy to get to know them. And I would do it in a very cynical way.

I use my empathy to learn about people. So I would listen. I would listen to people's childhood problems. I would listen and understand why they were in the position that they were in. And actually, that was a very steep and harsh learning curve for me because I had a very moralistic, judgmental point of view about people using heroin or crack problematically. I just thought, these are fools who've made the wrong decision and haven't got the willpower to get out of it.

But of course, by having conversations with these people, I was realizing that every single one of them had a story which meant that they were self-medicating for trauma. Every single one of them.

I remember in Northampton, there was a young woman who explained to me, she said, I can stop using heroin anytime I want. In fact, I do sometimes to bring my tolerance down so that it's cheaper. But the trouble is, when I stopped using heroin, I remember the feeling of my uncle's fingernails when he sexually abused me as a little girl. And that memory makes me suicidal. So I don't stay off heroin too long. So for her, it was a very pragmatic decision.

There was one that I got to know when I did an investigation in Nottinghamshire and he was a young man called Cammy. I got really friendly with him. I heard all about his difficult childhood, his abusive father, and it made complete sense to me how he'd ended up where he'd ended up.

But, you know, I really liked him. He had a quick sense of humor. He had a really observational wit, which I really appreciated. And I spent a lot of time with him and I went shoplifting with him, you know, committing petty crimes with him, which was great fun. I have to say he really was great fun to hang around with. But the trouble is he was incredibly useful to me because he was on the periphery of a gang called the Bestwood Cartel.

He was being exploited by them as a user dealer. And it meant that he was committing offenses. He was actually committing offenses on bail when I was with him. So he got arrested along with all of the others.

When he was in police custody, he ended up on suicide watch. And the reason for that, as he explained to the interviewing officers, was that the betrayal, my betrayal of him was too much. It was the last straw for him because never in his life had he had anyone that he could talk to. And he'd never felt that he'd had a proper friend before me. And when he found out that he was just being used by an undercover cop, it was too much for him. It was the last straw. And

But his sentence was three and a half years. Well, I remember when I was told that on the phone, the world just started spinning for me. I felt dizzy. I felt nauseous. Colour leached out of the world. Everything just seemed really grey and sat down. Heart was pounding, cold sweat. It was like an instant emotional kick. That really caused me huge upset. It was emotionally traumatic for me to hear that.

I started this undercover work in 1993, developed the training for other cops after about four years. 2001 was the year where I was chased with the car. And then I think it would be about 2003 where I heard that Cammy had become suicidal. And at that point, you know, I gave up undercover work. I said, look, I said to my colleagues, no way, I can't handle this anymore. This is just too much for me.

By this stage, I'd already had growing doubts because I was becoming acutely aware that these vulnerable people I was using, you know, I was causing them emotional harm. That the worst possible thing that could happen to them is meeting me. And I knew this. I knew it. Several times I'd gone through this thinking, well, at the end of the operation, I'll catch the bad guys. So that will make society safer. So the harm that I'm causing these people can be justified.

that the end justified the means. So I'd given up undercover work as a result of the Nottinghamshire job. But a few weeks later, a detective sergeant who sort of coordinated these operations around the country called me up and he said, look, Woodsy, we need you for this job. We've tried with two others already and they couldn't get close. We don't think there's anyone else can do this. And we need you to do this one because these gangsters are even more vicious than the last lot. It's a gang called the Burger Bar Boys.

They've taken over the heroin and crack cocaine supply in the town of Northampton. I'd heard of the Burger Bar Boys. They were probably the most notorious drug dealing gang in the country, actually, because a very short time before that phone call, they'd been in the news as being responsible for the double murder of two women, and they'd been machine gunned in the streets in Birmingham. The Burger Bar Boys were also infamous for their rivalry in their gang war with their rivals, the Johnson Crew.

It was also then explained to me that the Berger Bar boys are also using sexual violence as part of their reputation building. They're gang raping people just to make it clear they're the scariest boys in town. And so I was tempted into it because they appeal to my sense of duty and, you know, this idea that because I probably can do this job, then I must, I should.

I pushed all of my doubts about the efficacy of the work, about the harm I was causing, and just pulled myself up and got on with the job.

So I agreed, but it was a very heavy weight indeed because I was still emotionally recovering from the harm that I'd caused to Cammie and others. And I also had this sense of acute vulnerability that I was in constant danger on the streets because I'd had a lot of experience of imminent potential violence. But also I'd had multiple experiences of just not being able to trust my colleagues.

So I went into that operation with no sense of safety whatsoever, really. None at all. In between the Nottinghamshire operation and this Northampton operation, before I was tempted back into it, I was going through extreme tiredness, real lethargy, real struggling to be interested in anything. And it was depression, but with really very physical tiredness as a symptom. I

And I suppose that was probably one of the early indications that I was about to start showing some serious PTSD symptoms. But the thing is, as soon as I went into that Northampton operation, all of those symptoms disappeared completely. And that's because I was again living on adrenaline. And of course, when you're in that constantly heightened state, you're not aware, well, certainly I wasn't aware of the harm that I was doing myself.

I understood a lot about this gang and I knew that I was going to have to develop a hell of a reputation before they could legitimately do business with me directly. And also they were the top of the tree. They were top of a pyramid there. So to actually get close to them would be a difficult task. So what I did is I found my vulnerable people to manipulate them, got to know all of the people. And I built myself a reputation as a traveling thief, as an effective thief.

And in order to do that, I got this vulnerable couple and they supported each other. You know, they were a really supportive relationship, but they were very much problematic heroin users. And she was self-medicating for childhood sexual abuse like so, so many of them are. And he was self-medicating for a really strange acute pain condition, which was a degenerative condition which affected his hips.

And they really helped me out. They introduced me to people who would handle all the different types of stolen goods. So I just got networking, developed myself a reputation. And there's someone who could just about get hold of anything. Eventually, I moaned at my friends. I said, oh, come on, man, you get us a better hookup because I'm just getting these tenner bags of brown and it's crap stuff. I need a hookup right to the top. They agreed to introduce me right to the top.

I'll never forget the day I was introduced to them. I was taken to this snooker club in the centre of Northampton where they were sort of holding court. It was their temporary headquarters. And I was directed into the gents' toilet, which is quite a big room. But as soon as I was directed in there, then I was followed in by a guy, a sort of hooded figure. And he went in. He went into the toilet cubicle, stood on the toilet, closed the door and looked down at me from the top of the cubicle. And he said, what's this?

And as soon as he said that, the door burst open again and four more hooded figures came in. And they started walking around me anti-clockwise, slowly.

He started asking me questions and asking my friend questions. And as he was asking questions to try and test my story, my legend, every so often one of them would headbutt me on the side of the head, on the ear, or then one of them would jolt me or push me and another one would punch me in the ribs. And the sense of growing violence was just so tangible. It was just like the atmosphere. And, you know, I knew the reputation of these people. I recognised the guy looking down at me as someone who's implicated in seven different murders in Birmingham.

I sort of resigned it to myself that I just wasn't going to walk out of that room in one piece or maybe not even survive. And then just as I was coming to that conclusion, he said, all right, then what do you want? And I said, I'll have one and one, please. And so he gave me a 0.4 of crack and a 0.4 of heroin. And I gave him 40 pounds. Then I was in because then I was exchanging numbers with him.

From that day on, more than any of the people I'd ever dealt with, I never felt safe. I never lost that feeling that they would be imminently violent with me. Quite late on in the operation, because I'd started wearing a camera and I'd started getting visual evidence. One day I thought they seemed really suspicious of me. They seemed really weird. So the next day when I was getting ready, I didn't wear the camera.

And that was one of the best decisions I've ever made because when they met me, they bundled me in the back of a van and took me to the edge of a park in Northampton and said, right, white boy, you're fucking 5-0, man. You're 5-0. You're heat. Strip. You're wearing a wire. And to make it clear that they really meant it, one of them lifted up a T-shirt and I saw a gun tucked into the top of his tracksuit bottoms. But I remember feeling a really smug feeling that, wow, thank fuck I didn't wear the camera today because it turned out...

okay. There were police brought in from five different constabularies. Hundreds and hundreds of cops for this operation. It was massive.

Seven months of that operation, it was extraordinarily successful because in that seven months, I'd gathered evidence against 96 people. There was the six main burger bar boys who had got absolute watertight evidence of conspiracy for supplying huge amounts of heroin and crack cocaine, but also 90 other people, all of their support staff, sex workers, runners, user dealers, all sorts of people, all of the framework. And I knew that I caught literally everybody in this huge, huge town, everybody.

So I thought, wow, this is just going to sweep the town clean. This is going to be massive. When the dust settled, the intelligence officer from the operation had been tasked to keep his ear to the ground, you know, to assess the impact. And he said to me, we managed to interrupt the drug supply in Northampton for a full two hours.

Seven months of work, almost getting myself killed, feeling constantly at risk every day, 96 people arrested, all those resources and those police for the sake of interrupting that drug supply for two hours. Now, I can't say for certain that it's the infamous rivals of the Burger Bar Boys, called the Johnson Crew, that took up that opportunity that had been created by that policing operation.

But you can sort of picture the scene, can't you? They're all sat round, maybe having a smoke, and one of them comes in and says, hey boys, put the call in. We're going to make a fortune. Guess what the cops have done for us? They've got rid of the burgers. Fantastic. That's the reality of drugs policing. We always make somebody very happy because cops are really good at catching drug dealers. Hell, I was really great at it. But that's part of the problem.

Because police are really great at catching drug dealers, but they never ever reduce the size of the market. We only change the shape of it.

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From the moment I was told about interrupting that drug supply for two hours, just let myself properly think it through, you know, and it came in waves of realisation. Many times over the years, I'd wrestled with this ethical idea, the fact that I knew very well I was causing harm to vulnerable people, people who needed help. But I was justifying it to myself that at the end of the operation, I would make society safer. But here was clear evidence that that was not the case.

that actually violence increases wherever police have success because people compete over the opportunity you've created and they fight. Violence goes up almost every time, all over the world at every level when police have success in the drug marketplace.

Yeah, but you still caught the bad guys. You know, they got 10 years in prison. And yeah, the bergabah boys did get 10 years in prison. And yes, they were bad guys. But you have to look at the context. And for that, I'll take you back to the operation I did in Leicester in 2001. I met one guy who was an example of so many, who was a dealer, who was part of a gang. And he was 16 when I met him.

He was really likeable. He was cheeky. He was funny. You could have a laugh with him. But then six months later, he turned into a terrifying 17-year-old.

who was learning his way through using casual violence. And the reason he changed so much over that six months is because he was having to adapt to function in a way that he would survive within his gang. Because we've created a Darwinian situation where in inner city areas, the gangs that survive, that don't get grassed up, don't get informed upon, people don't give witness statements against to the police, are the most terrifying ones. So if you've got a reputation as a gang, you're more likely to survive. And he was learning this.

And so this trade, this illegal trade, literally was changing his personality, changing who he was. And so when someone says to me, well, look, you know, yeah, you can be proud. You still put bad people in prison. Yeah, but the system I've helped create or been part of has made them who they are.

And so I can't even take the satisfaction of putting the bad people in prison because those bad people were made. They weren't born that way. They were made that way by drug prohibition. Drugs policing does not reduce crime at all. And more often than not, it increases crime. Because with every single passing year that I worked undercover, violence went up. The streets got more dangerous. And that's because of the presence of people like me.

Now this was mentally catastrophic for me because this ethical justification for my actions could no longer be a justification and that actually all I've been doing all these years is causing harm to people for no benefit and actually at the same time I was making society more dangerous.

I'd been witnessing this, but pushing it away, pushing it down, pushing my doubts down. And I realised just how much I'd been deceiving myself for the sake of continuing on this work and fighting. And that was just catastrophic.

In some ways, it was freeing from a sort of turgid block of thinking in my head. But it was also horrifying because I felt profoundly guilty. I felt guilty for years about the harm that I'd caused vulnerable people who needed help. But this was just horrific that there was no justification for what I'd done.

I carried on though, and I got promoted to detective sergeant and I threw myself into other work. I avoided drugs work, threw myself into conventional detective work, into organized crime, but also rape inquiries, all of the other conventional detective work. The doubts were growing like some big black cloud. And I found myself thinking of myself as actually working for the enemy.

And then I was finding myself just sat in the chair, staring at the computer screen, trying to do basic supervision and just finding myself in a, in a cold sweat, in a brain fog, not knowing what the last two, where the last two hours had gone. And that was a terrifying experience. It really was.

I also had domestic problems. My wife was being very abusive. Now, how much of that was her responding to my numbness, detachment? I don't know, but it certainly wasn't helpful. You know, she physically assaulted me. She punched me. And then she started deliberately keeping me awake at night, which is extraordinary abuse.

So I had that to juggle and this growing sense of disassociation sometimes and finding my heart pounding, the sweat dripping on my forehead. And it was a rough, rough time. And then I suddenly found that I literally couldn't function at all. And so I went off sick, split up from my wife.

Eventually, when the kids were safe, I realized, even though I'd been off sick for a few months, I realized I was never going back to the police. I had to leave. I had to get out because what was making me ill was working for the enemy. And that's the way I was starting to see it. I hated myself for the harm that I caused. And I wasn't going to get out of that spiral unless I found a way of fighting the good fight. I found a way of trying to change things.

When I took that decision, it was such a massive relief. It was incredible relief, like the biggest weight I could get off my back.

I had all the symptoms at different times, you know, the disassociating, losing time, feeling a sense of intense dread, hypervigilance, feeling that someone was going to get me. So I went to the doctors and I was prescribed an SSRI. PTSD wasn't mentioned or explored. I just took the tablets. They helped for a few months. But then the symptoms started to get really, really bad.

I would get the weirdest triggers, weirdest. Like, for example, I took the car to the car wash and in the car wash, I would feel actual terror.

Until I had experienced this, I didn't realize that there was really different levels of fear because I'd experienced fear on so many occasions during my undercover work, genuine fear and real fear that I was going to die. But I'd never experienced terror. Never. So this terror, this extreme fear of irrational, like literally feeling I need to claw at the windows to get out of the car. I'd never experienced something this scary.

The games that my mind was playing on me, this fear that it was creating for itself, was much more extreme than any of the fear I'd actually experienced from real situations. It took me over a year to figure out that the terror that I was feeling in the car wash was from a memory that I'd blocked out. And it was a memory from when I was dealing with the Burger Bar Boys.

One day I'd phoned them up and they wanted to meet me. And so I went there, I went to this car wash, the Ark, and stood by it. And for those 20 minutes, I'm waiting for him thinking he's going to get here and he's going to cause me serious harm. And of course, I was in a fight or flight situation where my adrenaline and my brain was saying, run away. What are you doing, you idiot? But I forced myself to stay there and wait. So I stayed in a prolonged state of fight or flight.

Of course, when he got there, he was in a reasonable mood and we did the trade and we left. But I completely blocked out that memory. I find it really interesting that some of the actual near death experiences that I do remember are not the ones that caused me the worst symptoms when I uncovered them.

I still have weird moments that will really bite me in the arse. Moments where I'm in extreme hypervigilance, looking over my shoulder, thinking that imminently something's going to get me. And I can't find where they're from because there's too many of them.

What was shocking and is still shocking to me about what the brain can do to itself, because, you know, all of those situations where I've been genuinely near death, that fear was nowhere near to the level of this terror. It's so difficult to put into words because it transcends language. It's just terror. It's just fear with no object.

It's so purely guttural and instinctive. It's almost like the prey of a tiger that is giving its last kicks to try and stay alive. The moment that it knows it's about to be ripped apart, it's that moment of utter horror. And it's so raw that it also seems to be timeless, like it's never going to stop. And that adds to the terror. That adds to the fear that now I'm going to be stuck in this way, this moment for the rest of my life.

It's physically exhausting. And then you come out of it and it's just like a shaking sort of cold dripping mess, really. I was also getting a growing feeling of depression. But the depression was coming from a profound, and I really mean profound, sense of guilt, like a really self-loathing sensation that I'd just done unforgivable bad things.

I spent all of that time making myself continue doing something that I was feeling uncomfortable doing. I was going against my core principles. I was going against my core beliefs, my sense of right and wrong. At the point that I realized these people were vulnerable and needed help, I was breaching my own sense of duty and right and wrong, that despite recognizing I was causing harm, I still did it.

And so when the whole house of cards that I'd constructed in my brain fell down and I realized that there was no good to come out of the work that I did, then of course, all of that rationale that I'd spent time developing just collapsed. It really was like losing any sense of who I am, losing an understanding of who I actually understood myself to be. I thought, okay, what can I do? What can I do?

And I returned to the cause, really. And I thought, well, what I can do is I can use my experience, at least share my experiences with people so that other people can understand the harm that's being caused here from this policy, from our drug laws. For a few years, I'd read publications by an organisation called Release and another one called Transform Drug Policy Foundation. And I reached out to them and they put me in contact with LEAP, the Law Enforcement Action Partnership.

And God, that helped. It helped so, so much. It was such therapy because I could channel my knowledge and I could channel my energies and I could feel I was doing something positive. It's a very gradual healing process, but being active, being an activist, fighting this good fight now means that I am completely aligned with my core beliefs and who I am. I am following a sense of duty and I am doing it in an ethical way.

That's a great balm to a profound sense of guilt. I can't get rid of the profound sense of guilt, but I can manage it. I can rationalize it more often and better because of the work that I do with Leap. The harm that I've caused will never leave me because I know I have genuinely caused really nasty harm to some human beings who really were deserving of my help.

That's the extreme nature of that guilt. These people needed help and I only caused them harm.

The fact that I used knowledge about people's emotional state to manipulate them, it's not just psychological damage, it's very personal psychological damage. I found their weak spots so that I could make them dance to my tune. I knew what made them tick because I knew their dirtiest secrets. And I used that against them in a very ruthless way. And that fills me with such horror.

Now, actually, I think I've moved into a stage where I can't even recognize myself in those actions. But of course, we are a different person every day. We do move on. We are. We do become different people and we are allowed to change. But at the worst, I was just seeing myself as a constant. There was no passage of time at play here. I was just that nasty, evil person.

At least now, although that profound sense of guilt can attack me at some unfortunate times, at least when I soften that, I can see myself that that was a different time and I was a different person. I can recognize that I was behaving then as per the circumstances in which I found myself. I was behaving as part of a system. I was a product of that system. I was trained. I was a product of that time and place.

I had a different identity then, and I've certainly made a different identity for myself now because I'm an activist and I'm fighting for this cause, and that helps empower me. People using drugs problematically are trying to deal with trauma. They are absolutely linked, and the more problematically people use them tend to be the people dealing with them with the worst trauma.

Anyone who's using any drug problematically, we should be asking, you know, what happened to you? We shouldn't be morally judging them. We certainly, certainly should not be criminalizing them. And that really is a fucked up thing to do that we do to people.

Every social problem, homelessness, mental health treatment, the way we see people, it teaches us to stigmatise as well. It's not just the actual systems. It's also the way we're taught to think as a society, that we're taught to look down on these other people rather than care for them. And that's a result of our drug laws.

Our mission is to stop this suffering. It's to stop this persecution of people who need help, but also to stop this empowerment of organized crime, you know, because we can only take that power away if we take the drug markets away from it.

So now as part of the organisation, I campaign for legally regulated drug markets, take control away from gangsters and spend these resources on looking after people who are in pain rather than morally judging them and criminalising them. There are better ways of doing this that can make our society safer and allow us to better take care of our vulnerable people.

Today's episode featured Neil Woods. You can find out more about Neil and contact him by going to neilwoods.net. That's N-E-I-L-W-O-O-D-S dot net. There you can also find links to his two books, Good Cop, Bad War, and Drug Wars, with more details about his own experience and about the war on drugs in Britain. To find out more about his organization, LEAP, or Law Enforcement Action Partnership, go to lawenforcementactionpartnership.org.

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Hey, I'm Mike Corey, the host of Wondery's podcast, Against the Odds. In each episode, we share thrilling true stories of survival, putting you in the shoes of the people who live to tell the tale. In our next season, it's July 6th, 1988, and workers are settling into the night shift aboard Piper Alpha, the world's largest offshore oil rig.

Home to 226 men, the rig is stationed in the stormy North Sea off the coast of Scotland. At around 10 p.m., workers accidentally trigger a gas leak that leads to an explosion and a fire. As they wait to be rescued, the workers soon realize that Piper Alpha has transformed into a death trap. Follow Against the Odds wherever you get your podcasts. You can listen ad-free on Amazon Music or the Wondery app.