Euan's story: caught in the Yardies' web of crack and violence - in Aberdeen
Police warn of threat to cities as drug dealers seek new markets
Nick Hopkins, crime correspondent
Sat 14 Jun 2003 02.07 BST
Euan has a thick 12-inch scar running from the middle of his chest to below his waist, almost to his pubic hair. It's an ugly reminder of a stab wound that left him in intensive care for 12 days; he needed 47 staples and 67 stitches to close the wound and his parents were convinced he was going to die.
But Euan survived the attack in February. Every day since then he has reflected on how he almost lost his life, and how his son, 4, nearly grew up without a father.
The stabbing, he insists, "was the best thing that ever happened to me." Without it, he may have died from heroin and crack cocaine abuse. While recovering in hospital in Aberdeen, Euan, 27, was put on a methadone programme which should, in time, stabilise an opiate addiction he has had for seven years. He is not alone in fighting this battle.
Although the city has long had problems with heroin, these have been exacerbated by the swift, relentless spread of crack.
It may be several hundred miles from
Euan's sick-stained first floor council flat
in the Logie area to Hackney in east London, and several thousand more to downtown Kingston in Jamaica, but there is a trail between all three that crack dealers have been only too willing to follow, bringing with them a misery that the Scottish city is struggling to cope with.
According to the national criminal intelligence service (NCIS), Aberdeen, often referred to as the "oil capital of Europe", is now the most northern UK outpost of Jamaican and British-born Yardie dealers who have extended their business out of London in the search for new markets.
A number of big cities, including Bristol, Nottingham, Birmingham, Manchester, Liverpool, have already been affected, but police are convinced that others will follow unless they appreciate the dangers, and are prepared to look at the experiences of Aberdeen to help them prepare.
"If it can happen in Aberdeen, it can happen anywhere," said Detective inspector Willie Findlay, head of the city's drugs squad. "I have been surprised that it has reached the level that it has in the time that it has.
"We were probably a bit complacent at the start. It seems to me that the dealers look for towns where they can muscle in easily, not necessarily the ones where the biggest market might be."
Mr Findlay and his team first became aware of a potential problem six years ago when they heard that the criminals controlling the thriving red light district in the harbour area had begun supplying crack in small quantities to prostitutes.
Aberdeen has 3,500 registered heroin addicts, and many hundreds more who are not; the police reasoned that the users would neither have the money or the inclination to develop a crack habit as well.
To begin with, they were right, but the dealers were not deterred and set about creating a market.
"They were very clever," said Mr Findlay. "They started giving away rocks of crack for free when they were selling wraps of heroin. They were giving people a chance to sample it, and then they were hooked. The dealers punting the crack deliberately set out to target heroin users."
Euan remembers that he was introduced to crack in exactly this way. "I was on heroin and I was given some crack for free. I thought it was great. Crack gives you the high, and then you need the smack to bring you down, then you need the crack to get you high again, and you go round and round and round."
He says that more and more of the people he knows want to spend their money on crack.
"I know girls who are crack mad," he said. "Before it came on the scene, they might spend £90 a week on heroin. I know people who now spend £60 on crack and £30 on heroin. Once you start spending money on it, you can't stop. Heroin is a physical addiction. Crack is mentally addictive. You just want the high."
The ease and speed with which the dealers were able to exploit the city's drug users shocked the police.
Detectives believe the dealers are now supplying 95% of Aberdeen's heroin users with crack.
The city's drugs action group is providing counselling and family support to more than 200 heroin users who are also using crack as a secondary drug. Workers there warn that it would be wrong to assume that only deprived areas are affected. "Crack is classless in terms of the people who use it," says Lindsey Ross. "It's across the city."
The dealers have made significant profits because in Aberdeen a rock of crack sells for £50, more than twice what it costs in London or Bristol.
In the early days, crack was being supplied by a small core of West Indian criminals from the West Midlands. "There has been a connection between Aberdeen and Wolverhampton for 20 years or more," said Mr Findlay. "It started with the supply of prostitutes. They'd come up here to work the summer season, and then leave. The criminals were also supplying some of the heroin here."
The same gangs introduced crack but they are now having to compete with Jamaican criminals who are coming straight from London. In the last nine months, the drugs squad has arrested 30 Jamaicans in Aberdeen.
They were all illegal entrants and the police suspect that most of them were drugs mules touring the country supplying crack to dealers in targeted cities. "We have to be careful not to jump to conclusions, but Aberdeen is not a place that many Jamaicans come to for their holidays, and we don't have a Jamaican community, so they do tend to stick out," said Mr Findlay.
With the help of Scotland Yard and NCIS (which has been liaising with the Jamaican police), Mr Findlay has managed to identify the six major criminals who are controlling Aberdeen's crack trade. Two of them are based in London, and four are from the West Midlands.
There is some intelligence to show the six make fleeting visits to Scotland, but the police do not have enough evidence to arrest them.
Instead, Mr Findlay and his squad have been targeting the dealers on the street and the traffickers who supply them. The database of crack pushers they started three years ago now has 243 names on it.
So far, there has been none of the violence and gun crime between the gangs that has been the trademark of "turf wars" in other cities, particularly London, where a third of all murders are investigated by Operation Trident, set up five years ago to tackle Yardie activity.
The lack of violence, says Mr Findlay, is because the crack market in Aberdeen is not yet saturated.
"Criminals who are sworn enemies in the south seem to be able to work side by side up here. There is still an open market. They've no need to fight. There were no established criminal gangs in Aberdeen before they came, so they are not treading on toes. They don't get any problems from Aberdonians, and they are not impinging on each other's drugs market."
Mr Findlay recognises that this could change very quickly. At a conference organised by the Scottish Association of Chief Police Officers, an intelligence analyst from Operation Trident, Detective chief inspector Leslie Green, warned delegates that "the same people who may be murdering people in London, Birmingham and Bristol ... will come up here."
It's a bleak thought and one that the police and other agencies recognise is a possibility. There are already some signs that violence is seeping into the city.
At the end of last year, a man called Kevin Nunes was arrested on drugs charges in Aberdeen. He was released from custody and within 24 hours he was found shot dead near Wolverhampton.
Police know that he was linked to criminals in the West Midlands and London, and suspect that he may have been playing one gang off against another.
Euan says his stabbing would not have happened if he had not been using crack, but he cannot be specific because a trial of the man who he claims was responsible is pending. "There is violence with crack," he said. "There is violence against users and against prostitutes because the prostitutes think they are getting it free."
Mr Findlay hopes that Aberdeen's crack problem is being brought under control, and Drugs Action, which has been providing effective support for heroin addicts for years, has just won funding to launch a pilot project aimed at crack users.
One of them could be Euan, who is desperate to kick his heroin and crack habit.
"Crack is a waste of money," he said. "I have lost five stone, including a stone when I was in hospital. My parents thought they had lost me.I don't want to be a lowlife all my life."
