The Connect- with Johnny Mitchell - Cocaine Smuggling Genius Reveals Secrets His Global Drug Trafficking Business, Surviving Ecuadorian Prison

Episode Date: November 24, 2024

Pieter Tritton—dubbed the "Posh Pete"—pulls back the curtain on the dangerous and complex world of international drug trafficking. From crafting innovative smuggling techniques like impregnating cocaine into latex to surviving the brutal violence of an Ecuadorian prison, Tritton shares his harrowing journey. This is not just a tale of crime but a deep dive into the global drug trade's economics, its shift towards synthetic drugs, and the psychological toll of living on the edge. Discover how one man rose to prominence in the underworld, narrowly escaped detection, and reflected on his choices while facing life-changing consequences. Go Support Pieter! Book: https://a.co/d/jfBfcMx Join The Patreon For Bonus Content! https://www.patreon.com/theconnectshow Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Sometimes I make 10 grand in a day, selling like three keys of coke in an hour. I'm hearing about ways of impregnating. That is the future of cocaine trafficking. I start to realize that I'm at the surveillance. I get arrested. There was a song of shotgun in the back of the van. They then had to arrest all of the people involved. We were responsible for bringing in at least 80 kilos, but they know it was a lot more, but they just can't prove.

Peter Triton is a career drug smuggler who spent decades importing high-quality South American cocaine into the United Kingdom. came up with ingenious smuggling techniques and was one of the first British drug traffickers to figure out how to melt pure cocaine into furniture and pass it through customs. In the mid-2000s, Peter was arrested in Ecuador and sentenced to 10 years in the most brutal Supermax prisons in all of South America, where he witnessed horrifying violence that most soldiers never see in an official war. He himself was almost killed numerous times in prison riots and gang beefs. But he survived and was repatriated back to Britain, where he has finally been. finally put the drugs down and picked up the pen.

Check out his best-selling book, El Inferno, my time inside Ecuador's toughest prisons. For more bonus content, head over to patreon.com slash the Connect show. All right, ladies and gentlemen, this is one of the all-time greats. Peter Triton, right here on The Connect with Johnny Mitchell. The gangs were so powerful.

They ran everything in there. In the first week, we were in there. There was like over 30 murders. You just did not know whether you were going to survive that day. Violence came out of nowhere. Sometimes, hand grenades would come through the window sometimes and explode. I saw people get killed in there. Hacked to death, blown up by hand grenades shot, poisoned, electric cured, drowned.

Every which way you can think of. That's when I see the lights behind me start to flash. And I didn't even think. I just hit it. I was driving like my life depended on. Then I parked the car, popped out, closed the door, and I started running. And he pulls out a burner, shank. It's like six inches.

And he passes it to me. And he goes, here, that's yours. Don't ever leave the cell block without this. He was the reason I made it out of that place alive. Peter Triton. Peter Triton. That's a terrible English accent. Peter Triton.

Peter Triton. Oh, is it Triton? No, it's not. A bastard. Do you think there is more drug use in the United Kingdom than in America? I think it's of a comparable level. Because obviously, America. is the biggest buyer of drugs, but we're a huge country of 350 million people. I think per capita.

I think statistically Britain is within Europe is the biggest consumer of cocaine. Spain is pretty close behind it, but Britain, I think, is pretty well up there? What is it the, is it the, all of the, is it the weather combined with the trauma that everybody seems to have, right? And the pet, and the petestrelia. And you know what I mean? All of this, this is just a scandalous land. I think people, in Britain, right from the hippie area. My hometown, Stroud, was a synonymous hippie type town. So it's always had a reputation for heavy drug use. And there's a few towns around Britain like Glastonbury, you know,

but they have the big festival, top-nass, all these little hippie enclaves. Sure. And I think Britain's people in Britain have just always liked to experiment and use drugs. or alcohol or whatever. Yeah, I think also it's an intellectual culture still, so I think smart people are a little more depressed and like to relieve themselves of the burden of life and the existential crisis that is us on this earth.

Yeah, I think they like to relieve it with drugs. Yeah, escapism. It's escapism, isn't it? And yeah, for sure. Wow. Is there still a cocaine boom going on now in Europe? There's a massive cocaine boom in Europe. But what's the difference between now and like 20 years ago? Sorry, I think.

What's the difference? I mean, because it seems like there's been a boom on since the 90s. I mean, I think that, you know, the war on drugs was just a fallacy. It didn't work. It's only made it worse. And I think even though the chemicals have become harder to get in South America, they've just found other chemicals they can use in place. And there's more cocaine being produced than ever.

It's been shipped more widely. more countries than ever before. And there's just so much corruption and there's so much money involved that it's handing up all over the place. So you know what's so interesting is there is not that much money in selling Coke in America anymore. The cartels hardly bother with it.

I mean, it's there, of course. Like it's still the most used drug besides marijuana. Right. But all the money is in fentanyl. It's in crystal meth. It's in these synthetics. Is that because people use more of them? No, it's because they can control.

It's cheaper to make, right? So cocaine, you still have all these inputs, right? From the leaves to paying the farmers to paying the people to make the base. Yeah, well, they're manufacturing the fintz and all the middlemen. They're manufacturing the fence and on the men themselves. Right, exactly. And the price, you can only get so much for Coke. Like the price of a kilo of Coke in America, it's pretty cheap.

What is it in Los Angeles? Like that 50. I would say, like, if you're buying it straight from the, you know, somebody who just brought it over from Tijuana, probably no more than like 20, 25. Is it that much? Because it used to be about 15. Yeah, okay. I think it might have gone up a little bit since it, but they massively overproduced since the pandemic. They massively produced cocaine. And so it bottomed out the price a little bit. I think it's going up now. But what is in your time, the 20 years you were in the game,

did you see the price in Britain come down? I mean, I can give you an example now. Obviously, I still know people who are, you know, involved. You yourself are still smuggling in cocaine. No, I am not still involved. I'm just joking. And whoever put that out, who ever put that out on TikTok on that ex-crime or whatever from Dodge Woodhole,

I will find you. And I will be coming through your front door. I'm telling you now. Yeah, to paint it, because that's what he does. Yeah, to paint it. That's right. Red with blood. Your blood.

but no I am not involved in no no but I obviously I know still know people who you know obviously you got his I have friends yeah you know you have friends that are still you know so but but in your time

in the game did you see I was just going to say how the price has fluctuated I'll give you an example right now it was around about the 30,000 pounds mark within the space of about two weeks it dropped by nearly 10,000 thousand. Wow. So it fluctuates quite. It depends on if the load of big glow gets in or not.

Apparently, yeah. So apparently a huge amount of cocaine has just come into Holland. And now that's filtering out across Europe. Right. That's and that's currently weird on the street. Yeah. Wow. So, but it does seem like Britain is like an open market. Like there's really. Yeah. To some extent. Like if you're a group or even an individual, right, like yourself, and you have the proper connections, you can get product through. In America, it's kind of been monopolized. There is micro-trafficking still from Colombia, but 90% of it is controlled by the Mexican cartels. Yeah, I mean, people have attempted that here as well. I mean, the Albanians, for one, have certainly monopolized quite a large part of the market, the cocaine market in Britain.

Right. You know, they can be found in almost all every town and sitting in Britain in one shape, form or another. Right. But there is definitely still families, small groups operating, you know. But you yourself, just one guy from a hippie town, operated much like an Albanian clan that's got connections at ports in Ecuador all the way to, you know, people that they're paying off in Belgium to get the shit through. you, what's so fascinating about this is that you kind of on a smaller level, put all that together. Yeah.

I mean, we never paid off the pleats. We had the opportunity to. But because of the method that we were using, the impregnation method, you know, impregnating it into rubber, latex. You gave it to pregnant women to swallow. Yeah, no. I can tell you a horrific story, but I'm not going to about a pregnant woman. Yeah, no.

Okay. You don't want to know. So basically you're from this, you're not from, you're not, would you call yourself working class? Yeah, definitely. My dad, my father was a builder. You know, there was never a great deal of money at home. But you're not from the, you know, council estates.

You're from my, in the countryside. Yeah, yeah. Okay. Yeah. And you're pretty young, though. You got into the game. I was very young when I got into it. Yeah.

It's wild. I mean, my dad was smoking hash. so when I was growing up but you know you don't really appreciate what's going on when you're very young right

started to get a realization of what was happening around the age of about 10 or 11 while the age of 12 around about then I was smoking hash were experimenting with it

you know with school friends and then quickly led into dealing to friends I realized that it was quite easy to make money I had a couple of stepbrothers my parents divorced

my mum's new partner had a couple of sons they were both both involved in the illegal rave scene. And I saw it as a way of making money very easily because you could go to these illegal raves and there was no control by the police and there was no... You could just do whatever you wanted to really in some of these parties

and it was very easy to sell drugs there. And this is the early 90s, rave explosion. Yeah, very late 80s and early 90s. Yeah, so the rave scene, especially in your part of England, southwest England was huge. Yeah, massive. There were a lot of what they called new age travelers. You know, hippies, I suppose. Yeah. Really. And there were, every weekend, there were like four, five day long parties go. Yeah. And so you're selling to hippies. So there's no violence involved. So you're thinking this is a good business. A five foot one, you know. A five foot one, you know. You might be six with ten, but I'm five foot ten. But you know what I mean? Like, you're like, oh, this isn't a big scale. business like they show in the movies.

Yeah. But I mean, I did have those stepbrothers as backup and to so much extent. Right. And they, you know, one of them was quite a bit older and they were all involved with the local heavy mob and so I see. I always sort of had people around me that I could fall back on if I needed it.

Sure. Sure. You get popped when you're 17, when you're what we call high school. And you're a good student by the way, which is no surprise. You're a sharp guy. Yeah. What did you want to do?

Like, did you have dreams? Well, because, yeah, obviously, I mean, everyone has dreams when you're a kid and you're growing up. My dad was a builder, so initially I thought about becoming an architect, but there wasn't really much money in it. I've always loved archaeology, which is what I ended up studying at university. But I really, I would have been a good doctor. I should have done medicine. But just didn't have the financial backing. It's a six-year course in Britain.

Right. and just didn't have the financial backing to do six years at university. And, yeah, unfortunately, I went into pharmacy. Sure, you became a pharmacist instead, right? Yeah. Yeah. So you took a pinch at 17, you know, some bullshit, a couple ounces of hash. Yeah.

Yeah, it was fairly minor. No, and when you're a minor, you are a minor at 17 still, did you get, like, probation? Yeah, I got sentenced. I think it was six months probation and a small fine. And does that follow you into adulthood? That was, you know, it goes only criminal. Okay, it does. It does.

So you can't get that sealed because you were underage? No, no, I don't think so. It may have been, I think there's things at that level. I think there is a point at which it expires. Okay. So that's probably, it will still be on my record for sure. I mean, my record runs to ages. But I mean, like, does that, when you later on in life, when you started getting, you know, in big trouble, did, can they use that early charge to, like, hit you with a more prison time?

Yeah, I could bring it up. Oh, wow. So, but that kind of scared you straight for a few years at least. Well, I mean, it stopped me whilst I was doing my A levels, which is high school. High school. Yeah. So it stopped me dead at my tracks. And I was like, you know, I don't have jeopardized going to university.

Right. Which is college. in America. Yeah. So, you know, I just stopped dealing and stopped going to the poet, stopped taking drugs, just got my head down. Because they expelled me from the college, but they said I could sit my A levels. Oh, really?

Yeah. They threw me out. Okay. But you did make it to university. Yeah. So I got four A levels, or what was it, an A, two B's in a D, something like that. Yeah. So you had good marks.

Yeah. So I got four offers from four different universities, different areas around the country. Liverpool, Southampton, Bradford and Cardiff. And where'd you end up going? Cardiff. Because it was close to home. My mum had a heavy drinking problem by this point. It was having psychotic episodes and it was all really, really stressful.

And I had a younger sister who was four years younger than me. So I was kind of leaving her behind to deal with all that on her own. And I kind of didn't want to do that. It was quite worrying. My mum was half separated from her partner and was kind of living in a flat, their own and that's just it wasn't good so i i wanted to be on call right should we say so kind of to where i was living was right so you almost had a chance by train you almost had a chance you you were out of the game for a sec you were being a good son um but it's pretty quick uh that you got

back into it just from an opportunity yeah so i mean i've you know i've always been entrepreneurial even as a kid i remember coming up with business ideas and It's just a streak in me, I suppose. Well, you attract that. Like, I notice people used to ask me, how do you meet these criminal connections, right? Like when it's an underground business, you can't advertise, you can't put out an ad on Craigslist or in the newspaper. Even though some people do. Yeah, they do now.

They do it on, put it on Snapchat now. But back in the game, how do buyers meet sellers in this invisible world? And I would tell people, the best way I can explain it is, you attract it. It's swear to God, it is, you. You mentioned telepathy before we started the show, like how you think about someone and then you end up meeting them or they call you. That's how you would attract what you think about. Yeah, it's metaphysics. Yeah, positive thinking and telepathy.

Right. And negative thinking, too. If you're thinking, you know, you can attract the negative people into your life. Yeah. But I, myself, am the best example of that because I had no criminal connections and I still were able to meet these people that put me in positions to make huge money in the game. So you seem to, that seemed to happen to you. It happened really quickly actually. Maybe I have a trustworthy face.

I don't know. But, you know, I'm not stupid. I'm reasonably intelligent. And I found it very easy for people just to introduce me. I mean, that was kind of one of my rules that I wouldn't really work with anyone unless I was introduced to them by someone that knew them and trusted them. And I very quickly rose up.

up the chain, went up the chain to, you know, of suppliers from the level of buying half an ounce of cocaine to suddenly being introduced to people that were selling kilos and then to people that were selling tens of kilos to people that were importing tons. Right. And this was in college still. Yeah. And over, you know, from initially buying that half an ounce of cocaine for a fellow student, uh, within, I'd say probably three months, I'm dealing kilos. Wow. Who are you picking up kilos from? Basically, the local dealer back in my hometown who shared my name. Peter Trident?

No, not the surname, not the surname, first name. So we'd be peat and repeat. Those are little tags, cute. But yeah, not very nice. Fags? No, I'm just kidding. I'm joking. So he kind of got cold feet when I started bringing him up saying, look, I need like half a kilo

or a kilo, because a lot of it was on credit. Yeah. So you didn't have the buy money for a full? I don't. It was starting to get to that point. Yeah. But he said, look, I don't want to be involved. It's too much risk.

But I will introduce you to the person I'm getting it from. He's happy to meet you. So like I said, within sort of three months of buying that first half an ounce, because obviously I very quickly started meeting local dealers around Cardiff. And it was then that the larger amounts came into play because the local dealers were supplying. the whole of Cardiff. And I already knew some fairly big dealers back in my hometown and, you know, other areas through the illegal wave scene.

So I had quite a large dealer base already. And it just got bigger by meeting these local guys around Cardiff. And I then just had this brainwave. And I said to them, well, the people that you were previously being supplied by be open to having a meeting with me because I think I might be able to supply them. in turn. So I then met the people that were supplying the dealers in Cardiff, who were like the main deal is throughout the polar South Wales, in the Rondar valleys, Swansea, Bridge End, all the way down, you know, across South Wales, which is where the bulk of the cities are.

And so, you know, before I know, I'm talking to people that are asking me for two, three kilos of Coke, 50 to 100 kilos of hash, and then it goes up to 250 and then at 500, you know, it So who was your supplier then? Because now you have the best price. So you can now... Yeah, because you can now supply these distributors. Exactly. I didn't realize that the guy I was introduced to by the guy in my hometown.

So he introduces me to the main dealer that he's getting it from, the kilo dealer, should we say. The guy near Oxford, ex-musician, very well-conticted up in London. and unbeknownst to me I've since found out that he was getting it straight from the people that were bringing it into the country by the ton

or 10 and a half at the time they were bringing it using yachts, sailing yachts to bring it in they were dealing with the Meligine cartel at the end of Pablo Esbaugh is dead by this point but the Melagin cartel is still in existence

right this is like the mid 90s 95 something like that? Yeah, yeah, exactly. So you're only about 19 years old. Yeah, well, no, I was probably 20, 20. Okay, gotcha. Oh, look, here they come now.

Shit, they hurt us. Damn, they really are watching everyone. So these guys are bringing it in, which is why I was getting in at such a good price, and it was literally pure. I cut it open and it would have the beautiful per lesson and looked to it and the stamp and all the layers of wrapping on it

and the anti-dog relish I mean it was just really good cocaine. They put chili pepper or something on the packages? I mean there was loads I mean there was about six layers of wrapping. Yeah. You know there's a rubber sock around it to make it waterproof. Then there

was foil for the x-rays and the scanners and whatnot and then there was like this layer of relish quite often. Right. I call it relish because it was like a really, you know, for the dog. think it's like chili flake liquid that stings the dog's nose and makes them recoil something like that yeah and then more layers and then you finally get down to the cocaine right and so where does the yacht uh that's bringing in say you know a thousand keys so they were where do they come what part

of england do they dock well that the guy that was bringing it in whose name i cannot say because he's he's he was sentenced prince andrew yeah not far off he he got sent it's the 35 years, but he's now free. He was a very well-known criminal in London. He was running quite a large percentage of the British cocaine market. White guy? Yeah, white guy, Irish guy. So he had big connections in Southern Ireland.

So they would bring it in on the yachts, and they would do what's called coopering. So a fishing boat would come out from Southern Ireland. they would transfer the cocaine from the yacht onto the fishing boats and they would then take that into Ireland and then they would bring it into England overland by lorries, using lorries and stuff like that. Sometimes they would just come straight into Southampton, Port or Portsmouth,

directly on the yacht and load it. Interesting. There's probably less law enforcement in the Irish waters, especially back then. Oh, yeah, totally. You know, I don't know whether they had them paid off or not. but you know back then it was easier Ireland was still super poor it was something it was just a you know

this is before 9-11 had happened and it was just a thing's just quite a lot easier then right so you got connected with this guy you're getting his I'm connected to the guy in Oxford who's getting it from this guy okay he's bringing it in so he's only charging

you a couple points more he's putting a grand on it he's putting a grand on that's it's you're basically getting the wholesale price pretty much coming off the boat that's incredible what were you paying for a kilo so we were paying for a kilo So we were paying, well, it was like 25, 26.

Yeah. And you're, a thousand pounds. And how much are you then giving it to your distributors for? 28, 30 sometimes. Wow. So you're making like three to five points. Sometimes. A unit.

Sometimes I've made 10 grand in a day, selling like three keys of Coke in an hour. Okay. So do you have to buy this? Do they give you credit? Yeah, this was, because they were bringing so much, and it was most of it was given out to credit on credit interest. sometimes I'd be coming back down from London with a quarter million pounds

with the drugs, sometimes more. You know, I remember coming up to going up to London in a transit van because the guy from Oxford also introduced me to a guy for hash because I needed so much by this point. Hach. Yeah, hashish and weed. And I was asking for so much

that it wasn't really his thing. So he introduced me to a hash dealer, a Moroccan guy, half Moroccan, half Gibraletan he used to live in Spain but he's now living in Britain and I would meet him in an area of London called Blackheath and there's a common there

used to be a coffee bar there and we meet near this coffee bar back up one transit van to another open the doors and literally transfer it like two 300 kilos of hash in cardboard boxes from van to van and drive back

I would drive then back down the M4 to Wales sell it get the money drive back or give it out and then collect the money after a week or whatever. Was it, you were one of those dealers that was, you had variety. You had ecstasy pills, hash, weed and Coke.

Yeah, I was kind of dealing all the party, all the party drinks. Why, if you got, have you have something as sensitive as cocaine, why bother with the other stuff? The other things did start to tail off as I realized the amount of money that I could make through cocaine. That became the primary source really. And in the mid-90s, mid to the late 90s, the quality of the ecstasy dipped drastically because they were having trouble getting the, what's that chemical? One of the chemicals that's key to making it. I'm not sure. You're the guy.

I forgot what it's called PMC or P. It's like the oil, you know, they get from the tree. Yep. They were having difficulty getting. that. So the quality of ecstasy dipped. And at that point, I was like, you know, I can make it more money dealing cocaine.

Yeah. And there's also less volume. Right, you know, had to mess about with loads of hundreds of kilos of hash to make the same amount of money as selling five kilos of cocaine. Right, right. You know, so it was like, hmm. Yeah.

So cocaine became really, that started to become the main thing for me. So in the late 90s, how many keys, were you moving every week every month? I mean, you know, I'm still at uni. I dropped out of uni in my second year, moved to Bristol. Things got a bit bigger then because I met more people in Bristol

and made a connection in Edinburgh in Scotland because I knew the prices were much better there. And, you know, probably between three and five kilos of Coke a week easily. Yeah. Sometimes more. Just handed them off? Or are you breaking them down and stepping on it?

I would just hand straight off, one or two maybe I would break down into like half keys, nine's, uh, and then ounces. Did you learn how to stretch it or did you always keep it pure? Cut you mean? Yeah.

It was odd actually because around the time I was a university in my second year before it drops out, someone mentioned to me repressing and it was, it was a new thing. You know, I knew about cutting it, but people started to actually cut it and repress it back into blocks. And I was like,

what the hell is repress? And they were like, don't you know what? And I was getting educated at this point in the cocaine business. And I realized that actually it was better to sell it pure because it's always, if I was getting it, because I was getting it at such a good price, I could control more of the market by selling it pure and at a lower competitive price. Because obviously people that are using drugs tend to go where the best quality is. Sure.

and if they can get it for the best price as well, you're on a winner. Spring weekends are all about family, sunshine, and evenings on the patio. Before everyone arrives, I stop by my local Total Wine and More to grab a great bottle to share. With such a wide selection and the lowest prices, it's easy to find something amazing for everyone to enjoy. If you're not sure what to pick, their friendly guides can help. Find what you love and love what you find only at Total Wine. and more. Shop total wine and more in store or online. Spirits not sold in Virginia and North Carolina. Drink responsibly. B-21. Yeah. And if you're, you know, giving it out to people that are already going to

chop it up, you don't want to dilute it more at the top. Let them worry about that. Sometimes I maybe, I say on a kilo, I'd maybe put an ounce into it. It was just hardly anything. An ounce of cut. It was like 28 grams or a couple of ounces. 50 grams into a kilo, which is highly noticeable. Sure, sure. Were you yourself a Coke user? I was, yeah, I was using Coke, but I was never a big cocaine user. I just couldn't do it.

It was just too strong. It would make me too paranoid. Right. And I sort of set myself a rule that I would always do the business in the day and I would only use the Coke when I finished doing the business. Right. At the end of the day, when I was home, out of the way. And I didn't have any stress.

Okay. Were you happy? Like, were you taking care of your mom now? Was the money good? That was one of the main reasons, you know, I mean, I think a lot of drug dealers get into the business, you know, obviously to make money. But the idea was to make enough money to be able to, A, help my mom out, you know, and saw her drink problem. And B, to set up a legal, but a legit business. And I think a lot of drug dealers get into it with the idea of starting a legit business from the proceeds. I don't think so. We talked to a lot of drug dealers on here, and they had zero plans to do anything besides sell drugs, and they blew all their money. So you don't look like a guy that spends more than he brings in. I try not to. Am I wrong about that?

Yeah, I mean, I try. Obviously, when you grow up, you, you know, in the early days, I mean, I ended up renting the wing of a manor house, had some pretty expensive cars. But I grew out of that pretty quickly. And then I realized that actually it was better to keep a low profile. Of course. And, you know, I was investing money in shares. And I wanted to get into property, buying and selling property. And I was starting to get into it and then got arrested in May of 2000.

Right. Tell us about that bus. Yeah. So, you know, obviously, like I said, things have got quite big, well, very big for English scale and things. And it was my girlfriend's birthday. I'd moved down at Bristol because she had been going out with a Jamaican, half-German, half-Garish guy. He was a bit of a yardie. Sure.

And he had instigated the theft of Aquila Coke and had been car chase. Me chasing him around Bristol, there'd nearly been a gunfighting a restaurant. And it all got really out of control. And I was just like, fuck this. I'm moving out of Bristol. I want a quiet life. You know, we'd gone through people's front doors. We'd track down their families.

everything. It got pretty heavy. And, um, you know, so anyway, I moved out of Bristol with his ex and moved back to Stroud, out to out into the countryside somewhere quiet where no one knew where I lived, you know, particularly, you know, so he didn't know where I lived and also, so the police didn't know where. Yeah. And, um, yeah, so day after my girlfriend's birthday, I think it was May the 15th or 16th and I'd gone out to do a few drops and gone up to

somewhere near Stowe on the world was just near Cheltenham. Cotswaltz. So the Cotswolds is quite a famous area of Britain, very picturesque, which I lived quite near there on the edge of. So anyway, go into this house, drop off three hours of cocaine, have a cup of tea with the guy and, you know, collect some money off go out, get in a van,

driving a big red transit van, so you can't miss me. It was on hire, but anyway, drive about seven miles up the road towards Cheltenham. That means a rental people on hire. And suddenly there's a marked police car

comes up behind me, blue lights me, pulls me over and I think, oh, it was a routine traffic stock. Yeah. And it wasn't. They'd see me, you know,

the house would be under surveillance. So they'd see me come out of the house. I think they knew, that I think they had some Intel on me already. And I had a briefcase, a bit like a doctor's briefcase. And it was in the front of the van anyway. They went straight for that, pulled it out, jemmyed it open with a crowbar. So they broke it open with the crowbar.

And inside there were like a thousand pills and more coke, some hash for the next drop. And yeah, so I get arrested. there was a saw and off shotgun in the back of the van broken down into component parts is that is that can they add that charge like if you get caught with a gun on top of drugs can they enhance your charge oh yeah yeah yeah that doesn't help things especially not in Britain right yeah yeah yeah I mean

that's why I kept it broken down into its component parts I see because I knew that if it was broken down at least it wasn't in a usable form right and I was sort of dealing in antiques and so I tried to play that it was not usable and I'd brought it as an ante. I'm hunting fox. Yeah, I'm out hunting pheasants

and out shooting grouse, old old chap. Old, old bean with a sawn off shotgun. Can you imagine? Yeah, yeah, that's right. On a pheasant shoot. Right, right. He's shooting everybody. Yeah, that's how Dick Cheney got shot.

Yeah, because the spray goes a little bit white. So, okay. So they have, yeah. Did they have prior, like were they, did they have an investigation going on you? Or was this just a chance? They have that house under surveillance so that I think they were more investigating the guy who I'd gone to see and some other guy that I'd never heard of that was also arrested. So me and the guy in the house get arrested.

He'd managed to get most of the coke down the toilet, luckily. So they only found traces and some scales. a bit of money and I think a tick list. So he gets bail. I get arrested. I spend six days in Cheltenham Police Station, go no comment all the way through. Apart from, at one point,

because of the place I was living in, this manor house that I'd rented, in the stable block of the manor house, there was a special constable, like a junior police officer living there called Penny, who I used to play tennis with. I had no problem with it. She had no clue what I was doing whatsoever.

I said I was dealing in antiques and messing about online dealing in shares. So I used to play tennis with her. Anyway, a friend of mine thought it would be a good idea to expose an informant to have a loud conversation in front of this informant in a pub, in a bar, Stroud, about how they were going to kill this police officer because they thought she was responsible for my arrest. It had the adverse effect. It in fact made my case.

case, well, it made me look really bad. Yeah, exactly, a lot worse. Because at that point, I'd been held in Communicado, so no phone calls. No, no phone calls. Oh, wow. No contact with anybody. This is the third day of my custody in the police station. I was there six days in the police station.

You're not, you don't have the right to call your lawyer? I had my lawyer come in. Okay. But that was it. No phone calls to family, no visits, nothing. So basically my lawyers said, look, you're going to have to make a comment on this because otherwise the police basically said they're going to fuck you up. They're going to make your life hell, which they did anyway in the end. They don't like it when one of their own gets threatened with their life.

I mean, they took it really seriously because you think I've been in a police station for three days. And they've linked me to massive crime families up in London by this point. Right. you know that I'm not going to mention right you can imagine some of the key people right anyway you think certainly one of their police officers is getting threatened with their life and I haven't even had a phone call how how is this happening so I had to make all this comment you know that I was really friendly with her that I played tennis with I said ask you yourself I've got no problem with her and they and they said look we know it's somebody to do with you call your

call your people off, otherwise, you know, your life's going to be out. So I said, I'll do what I can, but when I get a phone call, because you've not given me a phone call. I don't buy any of this shit. You whymies aren't going to touch a cop. Stop being tough. Look at my case papers. That's what I can say. I mean, I'm not talking about you. I'm talking about these, these, you know, I don't know. I don't buy it. I don't buy it. If you're going to kill a cop, now obviously, they take that very seriously. They take it seriously, of course, because it's such a, it's such a middle. finger, you know. In Colombia, yes, cops get killed all the time.

Police officers have been killed it a bit. I mean, it's rare. It's rare. It's rare. If you can police officers here, you'll never get out. You're never going to get out. It's just like in America. Okay, so what was the result of this? Well, basically my security went through the roof. The security level

that they were holding me out went through the roof. I'll say another three days carried on and go, no comment afterwards. Yeah. They then reminded me into Gloucester Prison. I was the only potential category A prisoner in the whole prison. So to feed me, I wasn't allowed to talk to any other prisoners. They put me on the second floor of the prison so I couldn't tunnel out or escape.

I had to exercise in the yard on my own. All my phone calls were recorded, all my letters, photocopied, visits behind the glass. And just to feed me, they would close the whole wing down, open my door, put two officers behind me, two in front. walk me down to the whole plate, surgery, get my food, walk me back to my cell, lock me in.

Literally, they would come and search myself daily, rip it apart, strip search me, just trash all my stuff. Just punitive. Just, yeah, they really.

Punishment, yeah. Just being dickheads. It was called being on the book. So any movements that in and out of the cell, they would note down the time that I was taken out of the cell where I went, what I was doing, who I spoke to.

I mean, you know, everything was going to. They're trying to get you to crack. Well, just not particularly. They were just, you know, high security. Punishing you. To make sure I didn't do anything, you know, or attempt to escape or have anyone. Well, but they were trying to give you,

were they trying to get you to give up your suppliers and these crime families? No, because I mean, I went no comment all the way through. I mean, it seemed like they knew quite a lot already anyway. Those kids. Right. You know, I'm pretty well fucked anyway. Yeah.

Okay. So what are you facing? So, I mean, I went guilty after nine months. Yeah. So they gave you a plea? Is that what he's called? Yeah, plea deal. So they offer you, they offer you, say, like 10 or something.

Yeah. So I ended up with five. Okay. First depends. Right. Which is very low. But my co-defendants, whilst I was in prison, did something else. they then get arrested.

So I ended up spending nearly two years on Remand even though I went guilty after nine months. So when it came to sentencing at Bristol Crown Court, the judge was like, why is this guy being held for him nearly two years after he went guilty after nine months? So, you know. So you were basically held in what, for Americans to understand that,

he was basically in jail. Yeah. County jail or jail. Counting. Not awaiting trial. Awating trial. And then even after he was sentenced after nine months, they still... No, it wasn't sentenced.

I had to wait for everybody else's trial. Oh, wow. So I was sat there twilling my thumbs. Right. Technically not guilty of anything for two years. Well, no, because I'd already got guilty. So, but they still, they don't ship, they didn't ship you off to a prison. No, no, no.

Yeah. Okay. Okay. So then, so you really didn't do much prison time after they shipped you out of... Yeah, because I'd already done nearly two years. Right. So they give you... They then ship me to one of the most secure prisons in Britain at the time,

which was Parkhurst on the Isle of Wight, on an island, a bit like Alcatraz, it's on an island, just off Southampton, Isle of Wight. So I'm on a fucking island in the English Channel. Dude, I can't imagine what horrible weather you guys have. Yeah, exactly. I was raining and windy. What's the great story? I can't think.

You know that classic story. shutter island no escape from alcatraz yeah catamomone crust that's the bar so I'm reading that

you know raised on the island and I'm like I can just imagine you with a big beer yeah just reading by candlelight your only friend

is a pigeon in the window yeah a pet rat yeah exactly fucking terrible and they said

I would join to pack tea bags for a job and I was like no just leave me at myself I'm quite happy

I was just stick at stay myself just lock the door and fuck off But this is a pivotal time in your trafficking career because this is where you start to read and you discover this kind of, you kind of prophesize the future of drug trafficking. So go into this. So whilst a gloucester, 9-11 happens.

So suddenly all the security level at the airpools and the sea pools goes through the roof. Yeah. And inadvertently and amongst all this, loads of traffickers like drug mules and, other traffickers are getting caught at ports, airports, seaports with loads of drugs and they're all coming into present. Right. There's all these new scanners. Right.

All this new technologies on the way in. And I'm thinking, you know, the days of bringing blocks of cocaine in by shipping container, just chucking it in boxes with a few bananas on top. Yeah. That's finished. That's done. That's not going to be happening for much longer. Yeah. Walking with kilos in a suitcase through.

Yeah, exactly. The airport. Like in the film Blow, where Johnny Depp's on the plane, and he's got all those people coming in. But, you know, back in the day when it was so easy. And I'm seeing, and I'm thinking, that's what finished. I'm not reading books and, you know, I'm hearing about ways of impregnating cocaine, things like soaking it into shirts,

clothing, paper. But that's all kind of really old school and really basic. And then I was getting the Times newspaper. once a week, Sunday times. And one Sunday, I opened it up and I'm reading. And I come across this article about this shipment of cocaine that's been seized at a seaport that's come in by container. And it was plastic garden furniture, you know, for your patio.

And the cocaine was in the plastic, in the, in the, like, mixed into the plastic. Right. So they had to like, you know, melt the plastic down with chemicals and what. or to get the cocaine out of me. Nobody got arrested. And I was like, holy shit, that is the future of cocaine trafficking. So it's not Coke hidden within furniture. No, no, no.

The cocaine is in the furniture. It is the furniture. Right. It is the plastic. Yeah. And I was like, that is absolute genius. Yeah. And it was like the first time I'd heard of it.

And I was like, this is, wow. That has got to be the way to do it. Right. Because that, it's just, you know, it just lit a light bulb with my head. Yeah. It beats the scanners. Yeah, everything. It's hands off.

Yeah. You know, later on when I got into it, we were able to put a chemical into the rubber to counter out the reactive liquid test even. Right. So we could even beat that. Wow. So it was kind of, you know, how are they going to get it unless, you know, there was so many elements of doubt. And in British law, if there's an element of. of doubt, the case gets thrown out.

So, yeah. Common law, baby. So, you know, you find me guilty, faggot. Exactly. Exactly. Wow. So this was your Johnny Depp and Blow moment where he meets Diego, you had the wrong dream.

Yeah. Yeah. Like, this is your light bulb moment. Yeah, yeah. So, yeah, but I mean, at this point in prison, I was like, you know, I didn't really want to know about drug dealing anymore. Oh, so you thought you were out of the game. Yeah.

You were like, okay, I'm really done now. You know, it devastated my family and friends and everything, you know, relationship. Because you're not, you don't really have a ton of criminals in your community. Like amongst your family circle. Yeah, yeah, my uncle was kind of like pretty heavy on my mom's side. He was not a criminal, but he, I think he's dead now. But he was in the military and he wanted me to go into the military. I only have made him about six or seven times.

But you didn't have a lot of people incarcerated, so it wasn't normal for somebody in the family to be locked up? Around my family, no. Okay. No. So that was hard on your mom? Yeah. Oh, yeah, definitely.

Yeah. I mean, you know, for me, wanting to help and make things better, it actually made things 10 times worse. Right. She had a mental breakdown and, you know, ended up in a psych ward and all the rest of it. Oh, my God. You know, you can imagine how that made me feel, you know.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. What about your dad at this point? Yeah, he was, you know, everyone was devastating. stated. Sorry. So you thought, okay, and this is the second time now you told yourself, okay, I'm really finished.

Yeah, I just said to my co-dez, you know, we're so well-known to the British police now, you know, that our modus and operandi and the way that we were dealing, we can't go back to that. No. Because, you know, when we get out, we're going to be watched. We're going to be surveilled. Yeah. And there's just, it's just not going to work.

So I showed them this article and I said, look, I've just read about it. this. This is absolutely genius. So I said if when we get out, if I call, sorry, I can never twitch my eye talking about it. No, that's all right. If when we get out, and this is the point of which this guy cut this other podcast and

did this TikTok thing. Okay, whatever. Fuck him. Just tell the story. Fuck you. So I said to them, if I ring you, you're going to know what the phone call is about. And I'm you know, I'm going to basically want to start bringing cocaine in from South America. And if you don't ring them, that means

you'll never hear from me again. No, well, we'll stay in contact as friends and whatnot because, you know, you are friends. But on the scale of drug dealing sort of things, you know, the only reason I'll call you about drugs is for this. I'm not going to be ringing you to start dealing drugs again. Right. So you're not going to be, yeah, just doing it like the old ways. Yeah, exactly.

We're going to level up, if anything, or else we're not going to do it. Yeah. So I get out and, you know, I'd only done two and a half years, so I've still got all my old contacts. And I'm getting barraged by phone calls from people. Did you lose your money when you went in? Yeah, they put a, a confiscation order on me for about, I think it was about 350,000 pounds. they didn't get it all. Right.

I mean, stocks and shares and stuff and whatnot. Right. But, you know, they got a lump of it. Right. So I'm getting people bringing me all the time just saying, you know, can you get us this? Can you get us that? Do you want to be involved in something? Do you know, do this, do that?

And I just keep saying, no, I don't want to know. I'm out. You know, I'm painting and decorating. You know, I'm trying to stay straight. Then I start doubling in drugs at the weekends with my girlfriend. same girl from. She stayed with you. Yeah, yeah.

Okay. And of course, that's the slippery slide back into it. Yeah, when you start using it. Yeah. And before I know it, I'm, you know, starting to do a few little little wheat deals on the side just to bolster the money. Yeah. And the real crunch came when one of the clients that I was painting and decorating for started messing me around with the payment. Obviously not really knowing who, you know, my background.

Right. And I was thinking, you know, I could just make a phone call and have you kneecapped. Right. And it just really pissed me off. And it was one of those days where you just go, fuck this. Right. I mean, I've had enough. Yep.

And it was what I call a fuck it day. And I just said, fuck this. And I picked up the phone and I made that phone call. Who'd you call? The guy in Oxford. Or near Oxford. The one bringing it in whose guys were bringing it in. Yeah, exactly.

Right. because he had all the contacts, good contacts up in love. Although by that point, I'd also develop some of my own, to be honest. But anyway, I phone here and I said, look, can you find me a Colombian or oblivion or Peruvian or any South American who we can get to buy, you know, who can supply his cocaine in South America, preferably that can impregnate it into plastic or rubber. and he said well look give me a couple of weeks and I'll make some phone calls up to London

and see what I can do so a couple of weeks goes by obviously we didn't talk on the phone because I said if I phone you well it's got to be face to face nothing said on the phone so we were doing all this face to face so he rings me up and he said

come and meet me so I go and meet him and he said look I've found a Colombian and a Chilean up for meeting you The initial meat will just go and buy some Coke from them just to see what they're like. So I had a guy in Newport, an old contact who'd been bringing me asking me if I could get him kilos of Coke. So I'll bring him up and I say, look, I've got someone, I kind of explained why I wanted to meet them, that I wanted to start bringing Coke in. Would he possibly finance the operation?

And he said, yeah, I'll put the money up for it if you can get it off the ground. So I said, look, I can get you the Coke, kilos of Coke that you want. Give me the money for a kilo. I'll go and meet these guys, see what they're all about. So he gave me the money, went out to London, met these, the Colombian, the Chilean, bought a kilo of Coke, had a bit of a conversation with them, went away and they seemed okay. Came back, I don't know, about another week later, said, went another kilo. And then I said, look, really, the reason that I'm actually here is because I want to start importing

cocaine into Britain, preferably impregnated in rubber or plastic. Can you do that? A, can you get the cocaine? Obviously you can, because you're selling it too many and B, can you impregnate it? And they said, as it happens, we're already bringing it in impregnated in rubber in the ground sheets of tents, like for camping. And I was like, this is destiny. This is because, you know, like I said, I just don't believe in destiny. And it just seemed like a, It was meant to happen. It obviously was because obviously I'm sad talking about it as part of my life. Yeah.

And, you know, people say, well, would you, if you went back, can you want it to change? You think, would you? And I said, well, yeah, obviously, I've probably changed some things. But I think everybody has their destiny and is it pre-written? I don't know. So that was the turning point. Yeah, I mean, you know, yeah, to me, it was full steam ahead, really. So you didn't have to go to South America to make these.

contacts, they came to you. Yeah, they were already in London. They were living in London. They were well established. The Colombian had already been involved massively with the Carly cartel. He was from Cali. So he had originally been in Spain running what they call an office for the Carly cartel, dealing with huge shipments coming in two, three tons, distributing it, you know, hundreds of kilos at a time.

Then he'd moved to London. they'd opened an office in London. And then I think, you know, things have fallen apart. I don't know if something had happened. And he'd become an independent operator. Right. It actually transpired that when I was arrested in Stone in the World, you know, when I went to prison in England,

and I'd been getting cocaine. Basically, the guys that... Let's rewind. The guy from... Be just flowed. baby just flow you're in your head just just chalk baby the guy from oxford that i was dealing with who was getting the coke off these guys that were bringing in by yacht that all fell apart in 1998 we were we were sat a marble arch in london waiting for one of them to turn up with five kilos

of coke for us he didn't make it and we had a system of pages where we'd go to a telephone box pageing with a number of the telephone box and he would go to another box do a telephone box to box call Yeah. So we were sat by a telephone box waiting for him to turn up or to ring. He was on the way to us. Didn't turn up. He got arrested. We later found out.

Half a mile from reaching us with 29 kilos of cocaine in the boot of his car on a Friday night. He'd been set up by a, it was called Operation Dreadnought, I think. You can look it up. I'll tell you the guy's name. The guy that was operating the whole thing was Brian Brendan Wright. he was nicknamed the milk man huge drug dealer

and that was the guy that it was coming from so that had fallen apart by the time it's 2003 2004 yeah so now there's actually opportunity for you to like become the new importer

in many ways yes well to some extent but he he so the first guy gets arrested this was one of his right-hand man that we were meeting It wasn't him. Yeah.

So his right-hand mind gets arrested with 29 kilos. They, the local police had bumbled into a massive operation by the national crime agency and had messed up a two-year surveillance operation on them, including, I think, us, me and the guy from Oxford. We must have been in the surveillance at some point. So they then arrested, they then had to arrest all of the people involved. So they took down, they found 660 kilos on a fishing boat in Kerry in Southern Ireland. And they then found another 440 kilos in London, arrested 14 people. It was one of the biggest cocaine seizures in British history at that time.

And it was huge news. And we had been half a mile from that guy reaching us and us getting arrested as well. Yeah. So that was when trouble started. died for me. I think that's what led to me getting arrested in 2000. So the police became aware of me in 1998

because of all that. And then they sort of kept an eye on me and then took me down in 2000. So that was how things went. I'm pretty sure. All right. So bring us back to now this Colombian and Chilean. What I just wanted to say was

so they had them having been arrested in 1998, I got introduced to another cocaine deal. that connected to a very big crime family from North London, from East Lenington. I won't say who. And one of their guys was in Eryth. And it turns out, years later,

I'm driving around London with this Colombian. And he says, oh, we've got to go to Erit to meet a guy. And I said, the guy's name is not called, should we say, John? And it turned out it was the same guy that I'd met all those years. years before that had been supplying me cocaine when these other guys had been busted. And it was the same Colombian that had been given to him, who was given to me, that I was

now working with. Yeah, so you've moved up the chain. You've skipped the ladder. Do you see what I mean? And all that, you know, I've been to prison in between and all sorts of shit had happened. And suddenly, I'm with it. I mean, well, the chances of that is a very small world at that level. It's a small country too.

Yeah. Yeah. So you've found now your, your. getting it, you've become those guys that were getting it off the ship. Kind of, yeah. Well, yeah. So, okay. How long did it take to build up? How does this? So I have this conversation with the Colombian and Chilean and I say, look, I want to start bringing the cocaine in. Would you be interested in forming a partnership with me? I can bring money to the table, investment to upscale things. And, you know, I've got a big dealer

base. I've got loads of people that will buy as much as we can bring in. You know, I've got a lot that I can bring to the table. I can get passengers that will go out to bring the drugs in for us, mules, drug mules. So they said, sure, why not? And so we formed the partnership the three of us, the Colombian, Chile and me. The other guy kind of was a silent partner, should we say. He didn't really want to be involved. It was a bit too heavy. Even though before, you know, he'd been the one supply of me. Right.

It would become even too heavy for him. Mm-hmm. So you see how I'm going up the chain, you know, gradually. So we form this partnership anyway and start bringing it in. I actually go out to Ecuador to collect the first one because I think, well, it's the first one. the police aren't going to know about us yet because we're only just dying. So I wanted to do the first one because I didn't want to start sending, say, you to do something that I hadn't already done. So I wanted to go and meet the guy from Kali supplier in Kito, you know, to talk to him, to meet him.

I wanted to make, I just wanted to make sure that the thing got from A to B. Okay, describe the operation. So, you know, the cocaine was getting impregnated into or converted into latex. That was then getting made into the grand sheet of a tent. The guy would then transport the tent from Kali to a third country who didn't produce cocaine. So we chose, it was a toss-up between Ecuador or Venezuela. And we chose Ecuador because they already had contacts in Ecuador that they were working with in Keto. Right.

So they had like a safe house there. How does the cocaine get, what is the scientific process of breaking down the Coke into liquid to then be put into the mesh of the tent? Yeah. So the cocaine was, yeah, exactly, as you said, made into a solution. And then you can get liquid latex in South America. So you would get liquid latex. You would put the cocaine into solution. You would then mix the two together, put it into trays and try and set it very thin. get it as thin as thin as you can and let it set

naturally you know so it's almost like gelatin and then open up the ground sheet of the tent put it in between the two layers sell the tent back up and they would do a really good job so it looked like it hadn't been tampered and of course going through an x-ray it looks like as part of the tent

rubber doesn't show up on an x-ray or latex or a scanner and like I said They were able to put in a chemical that could counter the, you know, the liquid test, the reactive. Right. So they would put in a chemical that would counter the reactive test, if you see what I mean. It's unbelievable.

So, and also it would beat the dog. So those were the four main test at the time. So it was almost infallible. Right. So I thought, well, if it's that good, I'm going to go and get the first one because the chances of me getting stopped virtually zero. Right. even though I'm known. Right.

So your contact from Kali, the one who's over in London, does he have the, his suppliers are doing all of this? Like getting it prepared? Yeah. Did you go see the factory where they were producing it? I did later on. Okay. Yeah, yeah.

Why would you go over there? It seems suspect for a white guy who's on parole. Well, it was kind of. And it was suspect because I got stopped on the way back in Holland. Right. I've crazy story I'd forgotten about the luggage allowance

I flew out there with KLM and I spoke there luggage allowance was like 30 kilos or something like that at the time it wasn't carrying much luggage on the way out whilst I'm waiting for this guy to turn up from Kali I'm going out in the shops buying my family presents things like

ceramic plates big heavy ceramic plates boxes of cigars leather jackets you know loads of shit that weighs quite a lot. Why? Just to look like your... No, just presents for family, you know, because it was cheap and stuff.

Yeah. And also I'm trying to do all the tourists. So I've got a backstory, so I'm building up a backstory. Right. I go to visit Cota Paxi Volcano. I'm collecting loads of brochures. Just so I've got a story in place to cover me in case I get stopped. Yeah.

And I then get this. this tent, which we had five kilos in this first one. And it was a 10-man tent that weighed about 30 or 40 kilos alone on its own. It was huge. Stood about up to my waist and I'm five foot 10. So it was big. What is the cover story for sending a tent from Ecuador to the United Kingdom? Is it, is it, no, no, no, but my question is, is there a fake tent manufacturer? company that they produce as a guise to be sending a tent because i know columbia exports a lot of furniture that's like one of the things that make there no no no or this was just a fake name with a fake address no no no no yeah i wasn't posting it i was carrying it okay wow so you're actually

carrying this tent through customs yeah yeah oh jesus okay yeah so i like i said i wanted to go and carry it through so that i so that when i'm sending other people to do what i've just done I wanted to know what the systems were, what to look out for, how to have asked. And I was, you know, it's not the first time I'd imported something and gone through customs and nearly been caught. So, you know, I was, and I was that confident in the system. I thought, it's highly unlikely I'm going to get caught. Wow. So this is why I'm on about the weight allowance.

I see. So I get back to the airport. So I've got all these gifts. And now I've got a tent that weighs about 30 or 40 kilos and it's huge. And is it wrapped? like can you carry it oh yes but it's a you know it's a tent it's like in a you know it's got like a handheld yeah yeah yeah it's got a uh a handholder yeah like a zip well is it like a zip cord on it okay i see so you look like a british backpacker that's been camping and traveling about south america

which is very common yeah the brits and the australians are all over that area you got it okay that's what i'm trying to portray i see it's a good backstory yeah yeah yeah so you feel confident. Yeah, yeah. So I get to the airport and we put all that, I put all the stuff on the, on the conveyor belt and I'm like, I don't know,

about 80 or 90 kilos over the luggage allowance. And they're like, oh, you've got to get rid of some, some stuff or you've got to pay the excess. And I didn't have enough to pay the excess. And they were like, why don't you get rid of like tents? And I was like, I can't, you know, that's an expensive day.

Yeah, yeah, it's really, yeah. I really love that. So right in front of them, I'm giving away all these brands. new gifts of people that are working in, those restaurants, the cafes, and they all think it's Christmas. And obviously, the death staff at KLAM are watching me, going, what the fuck is this joke of doing? Right. So there's red flags going up all over the place. Right. You know, I'm probably still on parole, probation, whatever. You know, obviously I've got a

criminal record for drugs. Yeah. Yeah. And here's me dishing out all these gifts right in front of the airport stuff. And now, let me ask you this. Why is a smuggler, going through flying commercially, why not put the tent, why not check it? No, that's why it was going into the hold. Oh, okay. It's not handle it. I see. You're at the airline. Yeah, yeah, yeah, it's going into the hold. Okay. Yeah, yeah, yeah, which was lucky because that's what saved me, actually. So I get it all down anyway. I pay, I think I paid semi-excess. So I get on the plane. So I'm through, I'm true customs in Ecuador. And I'm like, woo-hoo. Yeah, made it. So fly to Holland, arrive in Holland, and there's literally a row of drug agents,

Dutch drug agents, in plain clothes. And I'm at the back of the queue, and there's like various lines of people, passengers queuing, you know, to go through the different, and there's a line of agents. And one of them looks down the line, sees me, turns to his friend, says something in Dutch, and they all look at me, and I think, I'm fucked.

That's it, I'm done. I'm not going home. you know they know well they certainly know something anyway sure enough I forget to the front of the queue and they say we need to talk to you

come with us and they put me in a holding room there's about three Europeans and about 30 or 40 South Americans and my turn comes and they get me into the office and sit me down and they say what have you been doing and I said

I've been to go to a taxi volcano know I'm a tourist. I'm interested in archaeology. You know, I've been doing all this, blah, blah, blah. Bullshit, bullshit, bullshit. Backstores fire, though. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And getting all these brochures going, you know, I've been here, been there, done this.

And, you know, the interview goes on and on. And after about 25 minutes to half an hour, they said, and I'm thinking any minute now, they're going to plunk this tent down on the table and going, what's this? We know, you know. And I'm just there waiting for the moment. And half an hour, 25 minutes goes by and he says, oh, sorry to have detained, you're free to go.

And I was like, there's no fucking way that they don't know it's in there. They must know it's in there. Otherwise, why have they stopped me? So in my head, I'm thinking maybe they've contacted the British police and arranged for me to be arrested in Britain, along with my, you know,

they're going to follow me all the way through to see who I meet, you know, like they sometimes do. They'll let it go through and take everybody down. So now I'm really proud of, I'm thinking, fuck, they're going to let me go through. So that flight from Holland, so from Skipwater, you know, to Stans, I landed at Stanssted, just north of London, which is a smaller airport.

But even still, it's only a 45-minute flight. The plane hardly can take it off before it's landed. I'm thinking, I'm shit, you know, I'm shitting my pants all like that. You're out sleeping on that flight. I'm thinking, oh, fuck, man. Anyway, land. And, um... Obviously, the tent had been in the hole.

So it had been transferred from one plane straight to the other whilst we're on the tarmac. Yeah. And I think that's what saved me. So come out of the plane at Stan is to get to the luggage carousel and there's the tent going round around. I get my bag and I watch the tent for a little bit longer. Right. Seeing if anybody's, you know, if there's any obvious surveillance or any obvious looking police. And I think, oh, fuck it.

there's another fuck it moment. Yeah. It's either now or never. So I just grab it and nothing. And I'm expecting to be poundsed on. Pounds on. Nothing happens. And I think, wow.

And I just walk straight through the Green Channel out and I'm out. And you don't have to pass customs if you're come already in Europe. Yeah, no. I pass. Oh, yeah. So at that point. In Britain. At that point, Britain was still in Europe.

Right. So you don't have to go through customs again after you get there from Holland. Exactly. So this has made me. start thinking and I'd come back to this. So I hadn't even told my Cody, my partners that I was flying back on this day.

I thought nobody needs to know the date that I'm coming back in apart from me so that no one can tell anybody. So I get out of the airport and I use the pay phone to ring them and I said, I'm back and they said, back where? And I said, I'm back. And they were like, you know, I take a train down to London.

They've got a lab, a flat arranged with a major laboratory. in it. How do they break down five kilos of liquid cocaine? It's not liquid. It's in the rubber. So the powder is in the rubber?

Yeah, yeah. It is a piece of plastic. It's a piece of latex. It's like a... Okay. You imagine... To give you an exact example,

you imagine the inner tube of a bicycle. Yeah. You know, like the rubber in a tube. Yeah. You imagine that rubber It's just like that. Wow.

So that is the cocaine. It is rubber cocaine. Yeah. It's rubber. It's a piece of rubber. That's unreal. So how do they... So we then had to cut it up because the cocaine is only present on the surface.

So you had to cut it up as small as you could. So we're sat there for hours. First of all, obviously, we open up the tent, strip out the sheets that contain the cocaine. And then we had to sit there for hours. was cutting this up as small as we could with scissors. We tried all sorts of methods using paper shredders, but it would just jam up the shredder. And we couldn't find anything that would like mince up cocaine,

mince up rubber because it would just gum up all the mechanism. Right. So the only way that we could do it was with scissors. So we would sit there for hours and hours to cutting these panels up as small as we could to maximize the surface area. We would then put that in methanol, pure alcohol, which is formaldehyde, 99.9% pure alcohol. That would then bring the cocaine back out into solution.

We would then add a little bit of acetone, which is, when I say a cutting agent, it's not a cutting agent as in mixing. is like to purify it more. We would then filter that through activated carbon filter papers two or three times to get out any impurities because sometimes there'd be colorants in it or carbon to beat the x-rays and stuff. Because it, you know, anyway. So you have it dripping through a filter,

basically like a cheesecloth almost. We would get lab filter papers, lab-grade filter papers an activated carbon powder, which is excellent filtering, any impurities out. So it goes through that. And you would really, basically when you soaked it in the methanol, you'd see it change colour from being clear alcohol to like the colour of gasoline. So once it was that colour, you'd know that most of the cocaine was out of that rubber. We would then re-soak anything.

we'd put that rubber back into fresh methanol to make sure we got it all out. So the liquid that was filtered we were then using wok for your stir-finding a Friday night. Yeah, a walk. Yeah. Non-stick wok. Yeah.

We were to have to have electric hobbs with powerful extractor fans over the top because obviously any naked flames and the whole thing explodes. Right. So we evaporate off all the alcohol. We were using basile, reoxidana, which is base cocaine. Reoxygenized base cocaine.

So that's cocaine without the hydrochloric acid in it. So it's basically almost like crack. It's base. Yeah. so we would add a little bit of hydrochloric acid to the liquid which is needed to break down the membrane of your nose to get the cocaine into the bloodstream then evaporate off all the alcohol

using these wax non-stick wax and you'd see it start to congeal in the bottom you then turn the heat right down and then so it doesn't burn So then you know, you keep staring it and staring it and stirring it and it would turn into powder and then you'd have pure, pure cocaine baby. And so you've got five keys in that one walk? No, no, no, no. You have to do it, batches at a time.

Yeah, batches at a time. And you're sure you got all the rubber out of that Coke so people weren't sniffing up rubber. Oh, yeah, yeah. No, that's what all the filtration process is. So you basically just described how they make cocaine in Columbia, the whole hydrochloric and draining it and cleaning it off. Some of it. It's almost like you're remaking cocaine. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

It's almost. Yeah. Wow. I mean, we... That must have taken hours. Yeah, yeah. It was quite a long process. I mean, it's working like two or three days probably to do that.

Wow. And did you have this process already or were they the ones that had the expertise? They had a chemist, but then I learned it. They taught me. We would then repress it. We had a 1510 floor standing hydraulic press. They made up a box. We got two compressed.

or plates for the top and bottom. Right. We'd put it in cheese cloth. We'd put a couple of numbers on the top so that it had numbers impressed in the kilo. And we'd repress it. Normally we were cutting it as well at this point. So we would put, we'd do a couple of tests.

We'd wash it up into crack. Right. See how pure. I mean, the cocaine that came out was pure. Right. But we would cut it with different percentages of what the cup we were using was finessectine. Because it would come back.

in the wash when you washed it up into crack cocaine it would it would bind really closely with the cocaine okay so it would come back so cocaine that was only 60% pure would present as 90% pure even though it had 30 you know 30 or 40% cut in there which was finesseitone right which is an analgesic okay so your your coke now how many kilos would five of pure turn into about seven Okay. Yeah, so because for all that effort, you need to squeeze out as much profit as you can. So you've got seven kilos now. Yeah. And we decided that rather than selling to loads of people, because I had a couple of people that would just buy everything. Yeah. So we thought the least people that knew what we were doing the better, obviously. So we narrowed it down to a couple of people that we would just take all of it to. So one of those was down in Wales in Port Talbot. I'm not going to say his name, but hi.

I was still good friends with him. He's out of the game now anyway. I would take it all down to him, drop it on him. He'd give me like a big bag of cash to come back with. How much would he pay you per kilo? We were doing these. Well, it depended on the price at the time for repress, but we were charging about $24,000, $25,000.

Okay. Because it was still really good. Right. So you're taking in about $150,000 from seven kilos, 150 maybe a little bit more than that 175 would be the math yeah so yeah because each of us were making between 60 and 80,000

per profit yeah so how much would one of kilo how much what were the cost to you from the you know paying the people in Colombia to melt it down into rubber and make the tent what was about your cost for kilo it was about 30 grand we were paying that covered that covered the people in Columbia could right the expenses the

trip all of that okay yeah great so this is like that's a good micro-trafficking operation yeah how does this expand yeah so so that we after that

oh yeah just briefly going back to having been stopped in in Holland that made me start to think why was I stopped in Holland and why did it why was it the Dutch police that carried out the search on the plane right so I

found out about the Scheneggen Agreement. And if you read it up in the Scheneggen Agreement, whichever country the plane lands in first in Europe, they have the responsibility to carry out the search of that plane. So I realized that if we got through the foot, because there were no direct flights into Britain from Ecuador, Venezuela. Right. So we always had to come through Europe. So I realized that as long as we got through that first point at Europe, you were good. We were good. So we would have passengers coming in to say Spain, I would then have them come out of the airport or just stay in the airport or buy an easy jet or Ryan Air Flight, which is a budget airline into Britain as if they just come from Spain as a holiday maker or even have them come out at the airport

and come overland by train and by ferry or by car. So you were obviously changing up points of entry into Europe for your mules. What were like the best airports to fly into? Spain is pretty easy. Portugal, Italy, most of them, to be honest.

And this is the early mid-2000s when there wasn't all this press around those countries as being hubs for drug trafficking from South America. Yeah, exactly. Ecuador was much more chill than. Yeah,

Venezuela wasn't as unstable. I mean, yeah, they were a lot more stable. Okay, so then you made this run yourself, you start hiring couriers after this. Very, yeah, very, quickly, I already had a couple of people lined up to go.

So we started to send we tried to do at least one or two a month. Okay. Are these white Britons, Brits, or who are these people? We tended to look for people that a preferably didn't have a criminal record. Sure. Certainly not for drugs anyway. We preferred the people

that were working, people that were presentable. Yeah. They were pretty calm, that stayed calm under pressure. and there were loads. Yeah. And then they would start recommending people that they knew. And it just snowballed and there were loads of people.

How much were you paying them? We would pay them between 10 and 12,000. It didn't matter whether we... The minimum that we would bring back in any one tent was three kilos. It was always between three and... Well, I say that. It was between two and five kilos. Okay.

Gotcha. And what were the different methods? I'm sure you didn't just stick with 10. Like what were some of the other? Yeah, we had, as well as bringing out our own shipments, we started buying shipments of other people. So other Colombians and South America were having things coming by post, by passengers as well.

But they didn't have the way with auto-extract it. And because we were quite well established by this point, and we had all the chemists, and we knew where to get all the chemicals. I'd found chemical companies in Bristol that where I could get the chemicals really cheap. We even had a side hustle where we were selling the methods, to other Colombians up in London,

I'd get like a 25-gallon drum for, say, 30 or 40 pounds. They'd sell it for 300 in London. Wow. So we had a sidehust and chemicals. Just selling chemicals. Yeah. Wow. Because they couldn't get it in London.

They didn't know where to go and it was awkward. But we would go in dressed, you know, we would send people in dressed as painters and decorators or we would kid, we like hijacking companies' details. changed a phone number. We'd have someone sat at the end of a phone just in case that because they'd only sell up to the trade. Right. So we'd make up vans with magnetic signs on the side.

Yeah. You know, all that sort of stuff. Wow. Do they still, didn't you say that they crack down on chemical importers and suppliers like that? After my case, they, they, yeah, they crack down on methanol in Britain. Okay. So now you're... But certainly in South America, they've...

Right. On a lot of the chemicals, like hydrochloric acid, ethanol is a big one. It's very difficult to get in South America. And that's led to the decreased purity of cocaine around the world. Didn't you say that? I wouldn't say that. The quality is... The cocaine that is made nowadays is not the same quality.

It doesn't have the same sort of strength and the same psychotropic effect. I suppose you would call it as the cocaine. But why though? What are the factors? I think it's because of the different chemicals they're using. Okay. And also I think you think if they produce a ton of cocaine and they only put 10% cut in it, they make an extra 100 kilos. Right.

And a 10% cut in it is hardly noticeable. But that's an extra 100 kilos at source. Whether they are or not, I don't know. but I think quite often it's actually coming all the way from source now, already cut. So they already send it from the source country cut? Yeah, I mean, you think, you know, they can make an extra 100 kilos. Right. But, you know, they're sending five tons at a time, 10 tons.

That's an extra ton maybe. And everyone down the chain is cutting it. So by the time it gets to the user, it's stepped on more. Saying that there is, you know, there is a lot of cocaine coming into Europe. and when there's more cocaine, the level of purity becomes higher. Because obviously when there's more,

the price goes down. Yeah, I get that. But why, then why? Okay, so then purity's actually gone up? I don't get what you're saying. Yeah, purity's gone up. Oh, wow. Fascinating.

Purity, but I'm saying the strength, the cocaine you could buy nowadays is not the same thing as it was then because it's made different. Okay. So you guys are now importing exclusively using this method of impregnation. Yeah. But I could see that we were having problems. You know, mules were a big X factor, a risk factor. Yeah. What were the backstories you were giving them? It was basically the old story that if you got, if you get stopped, well, if you got stops in South America, we used to tell them.

we would buy you out. Sure. We do whatever we had to do to bribe you out, get you out, get you a lawyer, get you out, do whatever we had to do to get you out over there. You know, I didn't want to see anyone go to prison. And we never lost a single mule, not one. The backstory in Britain was slightly different. It was the old time, you know, the standard spiel.

Oh, somebody asked me to bring this tent back. But with a difference, I would take them. Say, if you get arrested in Britain, just say, somebody asked me to carry this tent back, but you were really suspicious. So you opened it up. You felt all around it. You couldn't feel any blocks. You couldn't feel any powder.

Right. And you think how thin these layers were in the ground sheet. Who could know that? Yeah, exactly. Who could suspect that was drugs? And we were very careful about how much contact we have with the mules. Right. So there wasn't too much circumstantial evidence to link us to them.

So, you know, you know, They need to know. Yeah. Exactly. And their backstory is backpackers still? Yeah. Okay. So I said when it comes to court, get your barrister, which is what that's lawyer.

Yeah, like your top lawyer. Mm-hmm. To hold up a piece of rubber in front of the jury and say to the jury, would any member of the jury know that this is cocaine? Yeah. Every single one of the jury is going to say, no. Yeah. There's your element of doubt right there. Yeah.

Wow. is going out the window. That's brilliant. And the police knew that this was going to happen. Right. So they were waiting. They started trying to find out where the labs were. Okay.

And this is when the problems started. Okay. How long into doing this process, did the cops start to get wind of this cocaine impregnation? It didn't take very long because the Colombian and the Chile. And even though we set in, we put various ground rules in place, A, you know, no one should know where the life. was because it was a weak link in the chain

because it was, you know, the drugs were static. Yeah. The liquors were there. Everything was present. And it was just, you know, it was a very weak point in the chain as well. So on one occasion, I think it was about six months in. I was in Cali and we were, by this point,

we'd already had the conversation about upscaling things. You know, we'd already made quite a lot of money. And we were looking to start, doing it by shipping container and that was always the end game we start bringing it in camping gear tents

same same same opposite breast same method but we would just make a lot more tent and send it by shipping container so we were going to do

100 kilos the first one so while I was out in Cali I sent a tent and a mule back from Ecuador I'd then gone up to Columbia no I think two tents had gone back I sent one and then another one. So two tents were on the way.

The first one had landed. They were processing that in a lab in Crystal Palax. It was just an area of London. And they broke the rules. They got the Colombian and the Chilean. So they were having parties in the lab, doing Coke, playing loud music, cars pulling up.

They're dealing Coke out of the lab, having their friends in there. What happens? The police raid the lab. They got wind of it. Someone, I don't know, the neighbours probably, you know, suddenly there's all these South American, it's obvious what was going on probably.

Instead of keeping a low profile. And I said to them, don't go out and start buying expensive cars and get, doing loads of flash shit. You know, and what did it? You know, they're driving around in Porsche. It's going to be a W and it's just not, for fuck's sake. Yeah. Come on, guys.

And yeah, so they get arrested. There's about six people in the lab that shouldn't have been there. Everybody gets arrested. What did they bust? Did they bust the Coke too? Yeah, no, I think they found the precursor chemicals. I think they got three kilos. Some had been hidden.

We tried to get in there afterwards and get it out. But I don't know. Now, what are you doing in Kali? Yes, I mean Kali, when the bust happens. Right. What are you doing in Colley? Why are you there? I'm there to upscale.

Okay. So I'm arranging another 10 to go. And also, I'm there to have the conversation about buying 100 kilos of Coke. Right. And who are you dealing with here? This is fascinating. So, yeah, the guy in Cali was married, his niece was married to my partner, the Colombian in London. Sure.

So it was like a family contact. Yeah. So that's how we quite quickly established what had happened. So all the phones went off suddenly in London. Because obviously I'm bringing them from cabinas, you know, telephone boxes in Colombia, not from mobiles from cabines, just say hi, is everything okay?

And they all went off. So I said, look, you know, ring his wife in London. niece. I'll find out what the fuck has gone on. So he brings her up and sure enough she says,

oh, they've all been arrested. They were in a lab having to buy. I was like, oh, for fuck sake. So I'm now left holding the baby basically. I'm running the whole operation.

And we had put in another rule in place that if any of us got arrested, whoever was left outside had to look after the people that were been arrested, paid the bills of the family.

So that's what I started doing. You know, I was paying all the rent there, their utilities, their grocery bills, everything. You know, for all of the, you know, both the guys' families that were in prison. But going back to being in Kali. So the guy in Kali panics, puts me in a hotel because I was staying in his flat. So he panics and goes, shit, you know, we've got to be really careful. But by this point, I'd already had the conversation with him about, you know, buying 100 kilos.

I'd gone to see, inspect the cocaine in Buenos Ventura, which is a port city in Colombia, really dangerous. Super dangerous. Yeah. So we, on that, it's quite an interesting story. On that day, we traveled out of Cali in, like a four-wheel drive front area. And we'd gone to a funeral of, I think it was, the guy's nanny for his kids or something, her husband had died.

Anyway, we've gone right up into the mountains into fire territory. He had for clearance to go into fire territory. Now, me, you know, I'm a gringo, basically. And he said, don't worry, you're with me. So we driven all the way up into this beautiful village up in the mountains. And it was amazing. Took loads of photographs. There's this white, washed church up on the hill at the end of the high.

street of this village and as we arrived we're literally the only vehicle in the whole village and the whole funeral procession is coming up the the high street at the village towards the church and he says stay in the car don't get out the car um i'm going to go into the church and deal with the funeral and i'll be back out and uh as we arrived and the funeral and the coffin's been carried up the high street a fall broke loose uh you know what uh baby horse a foe. Oh, okay.

And it was almost like the spirit of the guy that had died because the foal came charging up the high street through all the mourners. It was almost like his spirit had broken free and was coming through the mourners. It was really weird. And so I'm waiting in the car

and he comes back after the funeral and his family had a finca out down in the foothills. So we drive down to the finca, go and visit his family and I saw a coral you know the coral snakes

really dangerous ones dead one there and they showed me that anyway we have some food and there we go to Buena Ventura to where they've got a safe house with 100 kilos of coke and I get there and the guys there in the safe house

are really paranoid there's a gun on the table straight away and they're having a really heated conversation with my guy. And they keep looking at me saying Policier, MI5. And I'm thinking, hold on a minute, fuck. They think I'm fucking British police. Right, right.

Or MI5, and I'm thinking any minute now, I'm going to get shot because it's getting really heated and my guy's trying to calm it down. And I said, and my Spanish reason really basic at this point. And I said, no, no, no, not police, criminal. And I said, I've just come out of prison. I was in Parchist. And as soon as I said this,

One of the guys that's going mad starts speaking English. And he said, oh, I was in prison in a prison that's just across the English Channel in a place called Wayland or Portland. Wow. Which is literally just across from Parker, and across the sea. And he had been in there at the same time as the guy,

another coincidence, that I'd done the importation of ecstasy with when I was at university. He was in the same prison and knew him. Wow. So he said to me, and he starts pulling out photographs, and, you know,

obviously the vibe completely calmed down. And he realized that I was genuine. He started being in Parkhurst, and he'd been in English prisons. And he spoke fluent English. Wow. So it was all happy days then. I don't know why you would be sent to do this.

If you're working with a Colombian, why wouldn't he just go back and arrange these shipments out to Britain. Why would they send you? Because they were dealing with the stuff back in London. Right. So their function, they were the best at diluting and turning it out of the rubber,

extracting out of the rubber. I kind of enjoyed going out to South America. I see. And I had just sent a passenger back. I see. So what I would do is I would go out to South American and I would make sure that the passengers had got on the plane.

Right. You wouldn't just send them out there alone. You would make sure that they were all taken care of. That makes sense. So it would take the, the pressure off the passenger and, you know, I would meet the Colombian from Cali. I would get the tent. Right. Then make sure the passenger was on, seen onto the plane and make sure they went off.

Makes sense. You know. Makes sense. Calm them down. Show them the ropes. Exactly. Great. You know.

That makes sense. Keep it all, chill and all the rest of it. So was the plan to dilute the hundred keys and impregnate them into a bunch of tents? What was the plan? How did you mean dilute it? You know, impregnated into the, into tents. How are you going to get 100 keys onto a ship and two green? I mean, yeah, we'd have put like three, three or five kilos in each tent.

Right, right. And then sent, you know, I don't know, 500 to, I don't know how many tents went in a 40-foot container. But they wouldn't have all had cocaine in. Right. Only like two or three boxfuls of tents would have had the cocaine in. Right. You know, it wouldn't have been the whole ship. Okay. So we would have done 100, and then we'd have, you know, with the money from that, we would have done probably 250, 500, then a ton.

And before you know it, you know, we were three steps away from doing a ton. Right. Okay. And that was the direction it was going in. And they fucked it up. And the Colombian got put under pressure whilst he was in prison. And he became a police informant. I mean, obviously, I found this out later. Okay, so what happened? So he gets released after six months.

And people are telling me, watch it. We think he's an informant. But he came out and he said, you know, he did have a reasonable excuse for getting released early because there were so many people got arrested in the lab. He said, well, they didn't find me with anything. The other guy, the Chileans taking the fall. All these other people were in there.

I didn't have any drugs on me. So they got no evidence on me. And it kind of made sense. And I was like, but the Chilean's girlfriend was calling me, saying, watching him, he's definitely an informant that he's been flipped.

And, yeah, sure enough, the police had put loads of pressure on his family. But the day he got out, well, not the day he got out, but a couple of days after he got released, I went down to London from Gloucester Island by train. Oh, no, I drove down, sorry,

with about 35,000 pounds in cash, you know, his part of the profits whilst he'd been in prison, you know, because things carried on, and I'd carried on doing things whilst he was in prison. And I said, welcome back. There's 35,000 in cash to get you started, you know. So whilst he's still locked up, do you move this 100 kilo load through? No, no, no. So because of, basically, because of them getting arrested, the guy in Kali gets really paranoid. So we kind of shut operations. So we kind of shut operations down initially. Then I fly back to Britain.

I don't get arrested because I thought I was going to get arrested as well. I stayed in Colombia for a while. I fly back to Britain wholly thinking I'm going to get arrested. I get back, I'm not. But I start to realize that I'm under surveillance. Start to see funny things going on. Cutting a long story short, I find out for sure that I'm murder surveillance via a corrupt police officer.

I didn't have direct contact with him, but a corrupt police officer in the men. Metropolitan Police in London. I had a third party in between who had contact with him. Anyway, he told me there was a massive operation around me. And you've halted imports at this time. No, no, no, no, no. Are you still, you still have mules coming across?

Yeah, yeah, I've still got mules coming in. I'm buying other people's shipments. Right. Um, extracting them. So I'd buy other people's shipments for like half the price. Yeah. Because they just wanted the cash. So I'd give, I'd buy it a really cheap.

price, extract it, cut it, make loads of money on that as well. How many keys were you extracting like every month? I don't know. Like how many runs? Well, we were trying to do at least one or two a month. Yeah. Plus other people's.

Plus I don't really want to say because I mean, they ultimately they charged me with 80 kilos. But the judge in his summing up said that we know that we were responsible for bringing in at least 80 kilos, but they know it was a lot more, but they just can't prove it. Okay. And it was a lot more.

All right. I'm not going to say exactly. All right. But it was a lot. Was it a thousand? You think you brought in a ton doing this method? No, not as much as that, but it was, it was, it was, it was in the hundreds for sure. Yeah.

Okay. And they were building a case this whole time or trying to build a case. Yeah. So they started a big operation. Excuse me. yeah so heavy surveillance around me started seeing you know the same faces cars you know yeah started picking up on it

and like I said I got told I was under surveillance yeah so you know being so careful not talking on the phones all face to face meetings not in not talking in any enclosed environment we were not talking cars we would turn the phones off, leave them at home, get out of the car, walk into a field out of the countryside, just to have a conversation. I remember in one year I took like 42 flights back and forth to South America,

around in Europe, you know, just to have conversations with people. Wow. I just having to be super careful because I knew I was under surveillance. It became a proper cat or mouse game. Yeah. But equally, I knew I was fucked. so I thought I'm just going to carry this on

for as long as I can make as much money as I can and get the hell out of it if I can and it got to the point where they raided a lab in Edinburgh the informant managed to find that the Colombian managed to find out that me and the other

Colombian the chemist that I started working with were doing something up in Edinburgh because this chemist I don't know what he said to him, but he must have said something because they were still friends, even though he knew he was an informant. And he had been followed up to Edinburgh by the police. And they met at a surveillance operation on our lab in Edinburgh,

and I spotted the suburb. First of all, the Colombians sparked the surveillance. I went back and checked, and I said, yeah, that's definitely the police. I said, I'll get you out of here now. I said, we have to leave all the drugs. leave everything and let's just go now. And the Colombians were like, we're not sure, we don't want to lose the drugs.

And I said, well, I'm gone. You can stay, but I'm getting the fuck out of it. And I left, I went to a hotel. Next morning, the police had gone, basically the flat belongs to a friend of mine. My contact in Edinburgh. So next morning, I quite quickly found out that the place had been raided.

It was headline news on radio one, two, three, and four, the BBC News world. I mean, it was massive moves in Scotland. It was the first of its kind in Scotland. They said massive crack cocaine laboratory found in Edinburgh. I mean, it was, you know, it was a huge. You don't see a lot of that in Edinburgh. Yeah, you know, they've even rested Colombians there.

It was like, there was chemicals, the press. I mean, it was a big deal. And they, you know, they narrowly missed me because I parked my van outside, so it looks as I was in there. Yeah. But I wasn't. But I knew that my time was up. And I knew that my forensic, I knew my fingerprints were all over the flood.

And, you know, I was done for basically. Right. Had you been stashing your money? Were you burying your money or hiding it as opposed to buying stocks? I've been burying cocaine in barrels and stuff like that. Wow. And bury money. Yeah.

But I'd been buying stocks and shares and stuff as well. Because stocks and shares are a great way of laundry money. Right. Right. Well, I don't know. I just asked because they froze your stocks the first time you got busted. Well, they didn't. They got something. They didn't. Yeah. Because I had all the paperwork hidden. Okay. All right. So I know the game's up for me. But I know that it's going to take them a while to get the forensic evidence back, you know, and the fingerprints, blah, blah, blah. So I get out of Scotland pretty quick. I get back down to Britain. England and I'd go back to my dad's place and I said, look, because he'd seen it on the news as well. I had friends ringing me up from Glastonbury Festival. It must have happened around June.

So I've had friends from Glastonbury at the festival bringing me up going, is this anything to deal with you? And I was like, no, as if I'm going to say yes. I was like, no, fuck off, go away. So I get back home and my dad was like, because he rang me up on the way down. He said, are you right? And I was like, yeah. And I knew that he knew. So I get back down and I called him out of the house and I said, leave your phone in the house. Dad, I got him out on the porch. And I said, look, that was something to do with me. I've got to leave the country. And we had a house in France. I said, look, can I go there? And he said, yeah, sure, just get it. Just get out of Britain because, you know, he didn't want to see him go to prison. I had a friend who was in the Turkish

Mafia. So phoned him up. He lived in Swindling quite close to where I lived. And I said, look, Oscar, can you get me out of Britain? Because he was smuggling cigarettes into Britain and all sorts of shit. Right. People. Yeah, probably. Yeah. And, you know, at that time, they didn't search cars going out of Britain.

Sure. They weren't looking for people going out. Yeah. So it was easy, peasy. So he said, yeah, just jump in the boot my car. And it was a Mercedes. He said, just jump in the Boat at Dover. Yeah. We'd go on the hovel speed, which is like 45 minutes. It's like a ferry.

Yeah, ferry. Uh-huh. So, drove down to Dover. You know, I said goodbye to my dad. So goodbye to my mom. And that was the last time I saw my mom ever. She died whilst I was in prison in the next door.

Oh. I would come on to that. So. Had your mom recovered psychologically from the first time you went to prison? She was still drinking heavily and having psychotic episodes. It was just going downhill and getting worse. but yeah okay so you get smuggled into france yeah so i get smuggled out of britain into france and i'm on the run basically and go and hide out my dad's place down in france didn't tell

anyone where i was um i'm still bringing the the informant giving him misinformation and i decided to do one last job with him but i wasn't going to pay him i was going to rob the money of him so i had somebody ready a mule to come out south of him American. And it was literally, it was literally going to be the last job. Because after that, I was going to Thailand. Because, you know, I knew us folks. I knew the British police were coming for me. And I knew they were going to find me in France eventually. Right. And friends of mine were going, look, just come out and stay with us in Thailand. We've got really beautiful villas out there. Yeah, get a sex change. No big deal.

See Gary Glitter. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, they said, just come out here. Just, you know, lay low for a while and you know they were involved in the export in hash and stuff right you know you would have got into something down there yeah yeah exactly they said come to see what we can do out of here you know

but just be cool um so yes so I said to the informant yeah I'll go out to Ecuador do with this one last job and he must have got

the sense that it was the last opportunity or the British police certainly got wind of the fact that this was their last opportunity to get me. I see. So I fly out to Ecuador and again, cut in a long story short, I meet the guy from Cali. I get the tent. The mule was on the way, hadn't arrived, and they take me down, they arrest me in the penthouse of a hotel in Quito. It was it Interpol? Yeah, it was Interpol. Oh, wow. Yeah, yeah. So they made the hotel. And they arrest me. My girlfriend's with me out there because I didn't see him for ages. So I flew out to spend two weeks with me. This poor girl. I know. First time in South America, she was only there for hours. She gets arrested.

Oh, Jesus. You know, she was getting hit on by a doctor back home. She was like, well, we give him one last, we'll give Pete one last chance to change, to change his way. Yeah, honestly, we only only just got back together as well. Oh, God. Women are right to hate us. She ended up getting 12 years, 13 years in prison. What? Yeah, the British police fabricated evidence against her. Oh, I would have told on you so quick.

They said that every time that it was the same girl from Bristol. Yeah. And I'd sent her in a daughter because obviously I was making a lot of money. Yeah. Even when I split up from her, you know, obviously I still stayed in touch with. Yeah. And I'd sent, you know, she'd come out to Holland with me on holiday just to see Yamsterdam. Right.

And I'd sent her and her daughter out to the Dominican Republic just for a holiday. You know, just them and her and her and their own. Just without you. Yeah. And they, the only evidence the police had in court against it was that they found trace elements of cocaine on the, on the luggage. There was fucking cocaine everywhere. We would be using cocaine. Right.

And, you know, and one receipt of chemicals where I'd asked her to buy some methanol for me. Right. And she didn't know what it was for. That was the only, her legal team must have been shit. Right, right. And the British police said that every time she'd been out the country with me or on holiday, she'd carried drugs back for me. Why would I use my girlfriend to do that when I had loads of mules? Oh.

Not once. And I can save her facts. hand on the Bible whatever you want me to put it on apart from your cock yes oh yeah obviously you wouldn't mind that she did not

ever ever carry drugs from me ever wow and they roped her into the conspiracy that's the brutality of that's like a DEA level American brutality that's what they would do here in Britain if they can't get you

and because I was arrested in Ecuador and they couldn't really get their hands of me they arrested her there as well, but I got around at a prison that I bribed the judges there. Okay. Got around and I said, do not go back to Britain and what did she do?

I had a flat arrangement in Barcelona in Spain. I said, go to Spain, stay with some friends there and just wait. I'll get your daughter brought out to Spain so she's with you. Yeah. And just let the case go run its course in Britain and see what happens. But do not fucking go back to Britain because they'll arrest you. And she said, well, why would they? I'm nothing to do with it.

I've not done anything wrong. I've got a young daughter there. I'm a single mom. I've not done anything wrong. And I said, trust me, they will arrest you. And what happened? They did. She got 13 years. Wow.

How many years did she do? Seven. Oh, that's terrible. Did she appeal it? Did she try to... I don't know. Because her legal team said, obviously, not to have any contact with it. I'd offered to write any statements they wanted vindicating, you know,

saying that she was nothing to do with it. They never contacted me. That's terrible. I mean, honestly, she got, I feel terrible about it. I've only ever seen it once since. Yeah. And her into and Strach said, hi, and that was it. You imagined seven years in prison for nothing.

Yeah. For something you really genuinely didn't do. Right. Did she have the opportunity to cooperate and inform on you and do all that? There was nothing to inform on. I mean, the police knew everything. And she, but she didn't even, did she, was she, been aware of your operations?

She knew I was involved in some sort of drug dealing, but she didn't know the level at all. And the methods you were using, I'm sure. No, not at all. Wow, that is crazy. That's even more totalitarian than something that would happen in America. And it's still happening to people here in this country. That's crazy. You don't, people think Britain, it doesn't happen in Britain.

I mean, there's innocent people in prison than this country. can tell you now. Absolutely. I mean, in America, too, but like the way that even though you guys invented common law and the burden of proof, like this burden of proof is on the government to show your guilt, it seems like here, just from what, who I've, people we've talked to and stories we've heard, they're able to circumvent that a lot more liberally here. Yeah, it seems like it's much more corrupt here than it is in the United States.

They just said it was, you know, literally true, they had nothing of honor that. No cocaine, not even a gram. Did she have a jury trial? Yeah. She went to trial. She didn't even have a gram, not even a microgram. They literally trade elements of cocaine on the baggage. So what were they accusing her of?

Dispiracy. Okay, so this is a conspiracy case, clearly. So you're the head of this conspiracy. And the Colombians are part of it and the Chilean is part of it. And they invested one of the guy that they said was like my right-hand man, he's dead now. Six people ended up dead in that case. Wow. How?

Murdered? Because of being informants. Two ended up dead in Columbia, one with the notes. In fact, one of the Colombians that was in the lab in Edinburgh, because there was a girl and a guy, the girl ended up dead in Colombia with a note pent of a chest saying that she was an informant. Wow. So six others ended up dead in. And I assume the main informant, the guy you're still breathing. You're kidding.

as far as so he went on the run the British police came over to Ecuador when I was in prison there and they sat across the table from me and they said if he ends up dead

we because they knew I wanted to kill him they said you'll be the first person we come and arrest and I said I'm not being funny the amount of people

because he informed on a lot of people sure and in open court at Bristol because I had people in the gallery watching the case

and I had a lawyer in Britain represented me and they wouldn't even give me the case papers even though I was named on every fucking page. The Crown Prosecution Service here would not release the evidence to me

because they knew I was going to fucking try and de-wale the case. And the judge, when it came to sentencing, read out a list of people that this Colombian had put in prison. And my friends in the gallery that were watching said they'd never seen that before on the court floor. So the guy had enemies all over the place. Yeah. So I said to the British police,

I said, I'm not, I said, I'm not being funny, but that guy's going to end up dead one day, sooner or later. I'm not saying, I'm going to kill him, but some will. And they were like, and they didn't know what to say to that. So who was killing, who do you think was behind all of the other witness killings? Do you think it was his Colombian family in Colley that was sending people? When somebody like that goes down, people, there's a cleanup operation goes and happens. People get killed. Right, right.

Because these informants were telling on everybody, it sounds like. Yeah. Wow. Okay. I mean, there's three of them in Britain. Right. Were they British or were they Colombians in Britain? Three, three.

Yeah. Yeah, they were real Brit. Damn. Do you want to repeat that? Cat got your tongue. They were all British English. Okay. Wow.

And they got hit. Did anybody ever go? Well, they, yeah. Well, they're dead. anyway. Did anybody get arrested for these hits? I'm not aware of anyone getting arrested. Okay. So now you're in Ecuador, you're fucked, your girlfriend gets arrested, you're arrested, they separate you guys. Why did you, why did the Ecuadorians not give you over to the British? They did talk about extradition back to Britain. Because I'm mad, the Brits wanted you so bad.

Yeah, the Brits were there in the background somewhere because I tried to, straight away in that hotel room, I tried to bribe the Ecuadorian police because I knew how corrupt they were. Right. I had $25,000 or euros on me in cash. And I said to them, look, I said, I'll give you 25,000 euros now. I said, give me a telephone

and I'll get you whatever money you want to pay off your whole team. You keep the bag, and you can have that. Yep. And just pretend you didn't find it. And one of them said him, and I laughed at him. He said, oh, what do you think we are corrupt? We're the Ecuadorian police force. I said, you're having a laugh on you.

I said, you're taking a piss. I said, you fuck off. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Really, come on, boys. It's like a stripper saying, what am I? What am I to you, a slut? Yeah, yeah, yeah. The Colombian, who I just given a bag of money to,

right. When I eventually got the case papers in Ecuador, they lost him in traffic. Yeah, right. They stopped him. They took the money of him, and they said, yeah, on your way. He got away.

Yeah, of course, they did. They took the money of him. Well, they don't. They lost it in traffic. Yeah. I can't. Yeah, but you're a gringo, so I think they automatically don't like us. And the British police were there in the bank.

Well, I don't know, for sure, but I'm assuming the British police were there. Well, that's how they got tipped off was Interpol. So now they have higher level people that are coordinating it. Exactly. So if it hadn't been for that, the Ecuadorians would have definitely taken money. How much cash did you have at your disposal able to? Quite a lot. You think you had millions?

No, no, not millions. But did you have money over there that you were able to access? Well, I had that on me, but I didn't have money in Ecuador. Okay. But I could have got it there pretty quickly. So how did you pay off the judge to get your girlfriend? Yeah, I had money transferred out there. So you paid him to basically drop the charges against her or let her get out?

Yeah, basically. I mean, Ecuador-in-law is pretty much who you know and how much you can pay. Right. So why couldn't you pay your, buy your way? I started paying off as well. I spent about 125,000 pounds on lawyers and bribes and stuff like that. Right. And you still couldn't buy your way out. I got it. Well, they wanted to give me 25 years, which was the maximum. And at that time, there was no remission. At the time, Oscar was in prison there. Yeah. There was no bail. There was no, there was no remission. There was no early release. There was no time off for good behavior. any of that bullshit.

Yeah. It was like, I think they were giving you a month off every year. So I calculated I would have done 23 out of 25. And when I saw that document, I tell you what, I remember I nearly passed out. Yeah.

Because 25 years in prison, I remember an Ecuadorian prisoner saying to me, if you spend any longer than five years in an Ecuadorian prison, you're either going to end up dead, ill or crazy. Yeah. And I certainly ended up ill. Some people say,

I'm crazy, I'm not. Right. or you're going to overdose. You know, you're going to get on drugs. Yeah, I mean. Which will kill you because you'll get into debt. Yeah. You can't survive 25 in an area of prison.

No, he said over five. Yeah. Wow. 25 is like, forget it. So. As you say, forget it. Yeah. So, but you got your girlfriend out.

How long did she spend in jail before she got out? About three months and three, three or four months? Three, three, I think it was. And how much did you have to pay? 25,000 got around. Okay. And the condition was that I took the rap. I mean, I was fucked anyway.

Yeah. So what did they have as far as evidence? Well, they, they see the, the tent that I was going to send back with the mule that was waiting for. No, it wasn't. It was only small. It was just two in this one. But I was just going to send it back with the mule.

And the Columbia wasn't going to get paid. So I was then going to, the plan, my plan had been. see my girlfriend for two weeks. She was going to go back to Britain. Obviously, the mule was going to go back to Britain. I was then going to go back to France, get a literally change of clothes, go to Thailand and spend six months in Thailand.

The money would be transferred there. And I was just going to stay there six months and let the heat cool down. Okay. So that didn't happen. What happens do they have? Did the mule snitch on you? Do they get the mule?

No, no. They didn't arrive. They hadn't arrived. Okay. So they never turned up. So they got away. They never turned up because they never set off. They never showed up or they just never got the bag.

They never set off because I didn't give them the green light to leave. I see. I see. Okay. Because. Okay. So what evidence did they have? So they had the tent. But the problem was there. They didn't extract. Even though I said to my lawyer,

isn't it surely it's better to extract the cocaine so it's less volume? And she said it doesn't matter whether it's one key. or 100 in Ecuador, you're going to get eight years or 12. It's weird, sentences, you either get 8, 12 or 16 or 25. There's nothing like in-between. Right. Unless you're an informant you might get four. Depending on the weight, obviously. Yeah.

Okay. So she said, you'll get eight years. We'll put you down as a mule. And they weighed the whole tent because it was impregnated. So it was lucky it wasn't the first one because it would have been about 40. So they weighed it. They put poles, pegs there. everything. Throw a little baby in there? Yeah, yeah.

So it was like seven kilos or seven point seven kilos. Did you tell them there's only two in there? No, I just, I was just, I told my lawyer, I said, look, surely it's better. I tell you what, if I'd have extracted it, it would have been slightly under two because obviously the process, you lose some of it. When Raphael Correa got sworn in as president, there was an indulter, like a presidential pardon of anyone with under two kilos. And I would have gone free,

but they wouldn't, obviously, the British police would have made sure that I got arrested. Oh, well. Because when they flew out to tell me about if the Colombian turned up dead, they also said, if you do, if you serve less than six years in prison,

or our sentence to less than 10 years, we will extradite you at the end of your sentence here. because I think they thought I'd end up did in prison there. I think that's what they thought for sure. So they were going to extradite me at the end and re-sentence me in Britain to at least 25 years. Oh my God.

I'd probably got like 30. So it was actually better for you to do more time in Ecuador? I was quite happy about the fact I got arrested in Ecuador because I knew I'd be able to get out there earlier than I would in Britain because in Britain I'd have been maximum security all the way through. No way of escape. I knew inequitable. If I couldn't bribe them, I'd be able to escape or get out early. There was going to be some way of getting out of there. There's some wiggle

room. If you can survive the initial years. I only thought I was going to be in there six months. But hang on. So you copped out to seven kilos weight-wise, which is a 25-year sentence. No, no, no, no. That would have been like eight years. So how'd you end up getting 25? I didn't get 25. So I started bribing the judges. And I actually had to say, to the judges don't give me less than 10 years. Wow. Because if you do, the British police will... I'm fucked.

Yeah, they're going to fuck me up. And are you paying them through your lawyer? Yeah, yeah. Okay, gotcha. So they gave me 12. Okay. The plan was then to wait for the heat to die down. And the British police sort of forget about me and move on to whatever they were doing next.

And then lodge and appeal, get it down to six, do half of six and get out after three. nice that was the plan and it just didn't happen okay because i tried to escape out of prison in in keto and uh uh that kind of fuck things man makes plans god laughs okay yeah exactly all right so let's get into it so how long does it take you to get all that adjudicated and get your sentence it was much quicker than britain sure i bet money moves things down there yeah so it was probably about six months and it was all done. Okay. And then because I could see things

was kind of not really going in the direction that I wanted them to and time was going by and it was just, you know, and then, you know, I'd had this visit from them and they said if you do lesson 10 and blah, blah, blah, blah, and all this. So I knew I was stuck there for a while. So I started, you know, I'd become friends with some ex-fart guys in there, some Colombians.

Yeah, the guerrillas. Yeah. And they said, look, we can get somebody down here with an RPG, like we talked about earlier, to blow the wall of the exercise yard on B-wing in the prison in Keto and have a mass escape. Just run for it. Yeah, yeah. Because, I mean, you could sort of move around the prison. That's also I probably told you in Kito, in the daytime.

You can move between wings. Yeah. And B-wing had a large exercise yard. And it was only one concrete block thick. Right. the war and there were a couple of gun turrets around it and that was it. It was really pretty laxed security. Wow. We talked about helicopter lift off the roof and that was like a hundred grand and I thought, fuck that. Yeah. And then we settled on digging a tunnel because

loads of people have escaped out of Quito by digging tunnels now. And what is the name of this Quito prison? Garcia Marina. Gossia Marina, which I think is closed down now. Right. But it's a super old prison. Yeah. They actually filmed a, because I was in an episode of banged up abroad that went out in America on that geo. It's still on there. And I was

the pilot episode in America. Wow. Which was the first time they've ever done that with the Brit. Because the episode was that good apparently. Wow. So they actually when they found out, because I told them the prison in Kito's clothes, you can go and film there. They were like, fuck, yeah. Yeah. So they flew out to Ecuador and

filmed in the prison in Ecuador and did a reenactment of a gunfight that I was in. You were in a gunfight there. Okay, let's get to it. Yeah, yeah. So they wanted to, there's all these escape methods. You'd decide on a tunnel. So we, yeah, so we buy a cell on B-wing. Like I said, the outside wall was the end of B-wing.

So we bought the penultimate cell on the right-hand side of B-wing and started digging a tunnel out there. And because of the way the prison was, you could have any. anything brought in. And you could get, you could get building materials in there. I bought a sale, had it retailed,

rewired, you know, you could have a TV in there, fridge, cable TV. It's quite posh. Yeah, yeah,

it's posh piece. Posh feet. And so, you know, it was, you could even have power tools in there for fucks, so,

you know. So, you know. So it's a little city. Yeah. These prisons in South, America are there are societies. That was exactly the way I've described. It's like an enclosed town.

There's shops in their restaurants, hardware store. Major drug trafficking. Yeah. Yeah. Totally. So we buy the cell, we crack open the floor. We make a cap out of concrete, you know, a lid. And we get people to start digging a tunnel.

And they just dug out underneath. And they followed the line of the exercise yard. the concrete out in the direction to reach the external wall and then under the wall. And we were getting close to the wall. Were you guys putting the dirt that you were excavating?

They were just getting rid of it and just fucking down the toilet just in the beans. Who were you paying? How many people were you paying to do this? And how much did it cost? I can't remember now. We had a few people doing it.

Right. Because we were going to take out as many people as we could. Yeah. I thought, fuck it, why not? If you did a tunnel, let's get, the Great Escape. Right, sure, exactly. That's the vision I had.

Yeah. The Great Escape and then I was going to try and go into Brazil and down the Amazon and fucking. Did you have that as a plan? That's kind of what I had in my head. Yeah, because, you know, I knew I had to get out of Ecuador. And did you realize that you couldn't go back to Britain? Oh, yeah, yeah. Okay.

So you were mentally prepared to never see Jolly Old again. Yeah, which is difficult. Yeah. Okay. So go on. Yeah, so anyway, the plans get rumbled. I don't know, someone spoke to someone and someone spoke to someone else

and the guards found out that I was trying to escape. And they even came and sat down with me and said, and how much do you want to pay us to let you out? And I was like, hmm. Because, I mean, there were people paying guards off, corrupt groups, guards. And they would literally give you a uniform and on a night shift, they would take you out of the front door

for 60 grand and stuff. that. So. Why didn't you take them up? Well, I was thinking about it. But anyway. You didn't want to pay 60 grand? Well, no, I was thinking about it.

But I don't know whether these guards were sent to test the war. Right. Or maybe they take your money and then as you're escaping, they shoot you in the back. Yeah, it's hard to trust them. There was a lot of risk. Totally. And anyway, it all gets fucked up and rumbled. And on a visit day, one day a guard turns up with a pole, with a people.

piece of word and says come with me to the heavy like head guard's office heavy to hear and i i didn't know what was going on so i get down there and he says oh you've been transferred and i said what do you mean being transferred you know i sort of settled into the fact i was doing my time in it in keto in gas and milerreino i bought a load of cells yeah made myself nice you know that was having a good time had a really nice girlfriend then all sorts of shit isn't that nice yeah and um life was good in prison. Yeah, yeah. And suddenly I'm getting transfer then.

And I didn't realize, but all of the Colombians involved were getting transferred to different prisons all around the country as well. They were splitting this up. Yeah. And I got sent to Guaya Keel, which at the time was the third most dangerous prison in the whole of South America. Tell us about it. It quite quickly became the first or the most dangerous prison in the whole of South America.

And I think it's still pretty much well up there. Okay. Tell us what? I was like, holy shit, because I'd seen like on the news gun fights between the police and inmates and pictures of the police dropping bombs out of helicopters onto the prison. And I mean, just anarchy. I was like, fuck, I know that prison is like really dangerous. And any foreigner going out there gets extorted.

So I hit panic button. And I got a Colombian friend of mine who was really well contacted out there, who ran the bakery on the wing that I was on and I got a message to him and he managed to get down to see me because he's friends with all the guards so he got down to see me before I left and I said look phone up

one of the head bosses down in Guayaquil a guy called coyote who's now dead but he had been in keto for six months on like a punishment lie down they'd brought him up there for six months to punish him and I'd made him once to talk about trafficking. And I said,

look, bring him up and fucking try and make sure I don't get extorted when I get down to go IKEA or tortured or whatever the fuck. And because I didn't really know what was going on. I was getting told all sorts of different things that I was getting transferred.

Anyway, I get transferred down there. And on the second day, a reception group of about 50 inmates gang members come walking out the front gate of the prison to the like where the block of the wings are across a dirt road which was like the perimeter

to the outer perimeter where the director's office was where there was like a little holding cell which I was in and they said are you the English guy from Quito and I thought this is going to go one or two ways either I'm going to get extorted to fuck and killed or my friend has managed to get through to them and I'm going to be alright.

And they said, oh, you're friends on the phone. And they handed me, and they all had mobile phones, guns on them, all brand new sports gear on. And the guys just opened the gate and let them walk out, 50 of them. It's like it's the streets. Yeah. Were you terrified? Yeah, yeah, I was bricking it.

Do you know what I thought, I'm, you know. You're bricking it? You had an erection? No, no, okay. Bricking it in Britain, me, sheating it. Yeah. No, no, no. I was far from excited.

Not at all. Not at all ecstatic. Holy shit. This is what I've been waiting. This is my king. I'm getting off. 50 Ecuadorian gangbangers come to kill me. I'm about to blow my load.

No. Had you had part of you accepted because you'd been in prison long enough to know how easily people get killed on a daily basis? I mean, on my second day in. prison in Quito. An English guy had taken me over to the B-wing to meet one of the gang members there. Two hours later, he'd been strung up, shot and stabbed, and they'd made it look like a suicide, and the guards wrote it down as suicide. And my mate took me and said, look up that window.

You know that guy we just saw two hours ago. That's him. He's dead. And I was like, fuck. Were foreigners getting killed as well? Or was that mostly amongst the gangs? In keto, no, not really. Keto wasn't so bad for gangs.

It was pretty chill. Okay, so was it kind of like just the way that foreigners, it's kind of taboo to kill them in South America's because the heat comes down? Was that the same rule in prison? Not so much. No, not really. So how do you think you? In Guaya Keel, they had like pretty much a meat market down there.

As soon as a foreigner arrived, what would happen is because all the guards were paid off and the director of the prison was paid by the gangs in there and the gangs were so powerful. They ran everything in there. There were two gangs at war with each other. The Cubano's at this time and Los Rousseaus. The prison was 8,000 prisoners, 24 wings, absolutely massive. And the wings were like this.

They were parallel to each other, one wing in front of the other. And then a long corridor, say a kilometer long, running down the middle. And about halfway down, there was a border and you couldn't cross it because that was enemy territory. That was the other gang. And I was one side.

So I end up on the Cubano side of three brothers, nickname Lost Cubanos. Right. It was a third gang came in later. The Torneros, who ended up on the wing that I was on. A guy called Raskina, nicknamed Raskina,

who I became quite friendly with. He's now dead. and I'm very, still very friendly with his brother, Carlos Zambrano. Hi, Carlos. Okay, so if you were on the, if you stayed on your side, you weren't going to get killed within your own gang. No, but if you strayed onto the other one and then came back, they would torture you to find out if you'd been sent back to kill, like, as an informant

or to, or, you know, as a hitman or whatever. Okay. But on this first day, or second day, sorry, when they came out, they handed me this phone. They said, this is your friend in Keito? They put me on the phone, and it wasn't my friend at all. It was the Syrian guy that was running the wing in Quito, who I'd kind of started budding heads with

because I was starting to take the wing over and run things on that wing because it was kind of for foreigners. Drugs? Bying the cells. I owned like five cells. I was renting them out. Running some drugs off of there.

I started a gang called the Eurobanda. Bandit in Spanish. It means gang. So as a joke, I formed up a gang. I thought, well, fuck it, everyone else has got a gang. Why shouldn't we? Right.

I'd like a load of Russians, Lithuanians, some Brits. Yeah. And we called ourselves Euroband. It was a bit of a joke. Nice. I like it.

But I teamed up with that bunch of Colombians on D-Wing, who I tried to escape with. I see. So we had a gun, you know, we were, we were told up.

Right. Okay. Anyway, different story in Guayaquil, completely. So anyway, they put me on the phone. It was a Syrian guy. And I'd been told that I'd been transferred down there

so he could take all those sales off me because each cell was worth like about three or four grand. They all had TVs, fridges in, you know, beds. And anyway, I didn't really know what was going on. And I said, you're not my fucking friend. I don't want to talk to you. Anyway, luckily for me, my Colombian friend had managed get through to coyote this boss who ran the cuiranos yeah who was like joint with the cubanos and he'd put in a

good word for me so i got taken to like this good wing yeah with one of the bosses of the drugs on that wing who ran it was basically the boss for all the what they call polvo over there which is like it's a byproduct of the cocaine process which they smoke basse yeah it is but it isn't it's a bit I, Basset. Yeah, it's, yeah, Basset. Basse, Polovo means dust. Yeah, I know, but it's... It's the extracts, right?

Yeah, it's all the stuff that falls down, the chemicals. Yeah, it's all that horrible, stinking shit. It smells really bad. It's that all. Yeah. So they put me in the cell with the boss for the whole of that side of the prison. And he had a rucksack full of this shit in there and a handgun. I'm like, I don't want to be in their cell.

Because if the police turn up, I'm probably going to get fucked as well. Right. Yeah, you know. So after a little while just to grease the wheels because they didn't extort me because they knew I had contacts and whatnot and I'd been in Kiso two years. So I was really lucky because any other foreigners, what they would do is, like I said, that if a foreigner arrived, the guard would come in, he would tell the boss of the gang and they would have like an auction and whoever, like they'd have a, so the Cubano's were three brothers.

And on each wing, they had a boss on each wing. So it was like a pyramid. Proper mafia structure. So they had a boss on each wing that ran each wing that reported to them, that collected all the money of everybody on the wing. They paid tribute up to them. They had a boss, a boss for each drug. So a boss of the Coke, a boss of the Basse, a boss of the wheat.

That was the three drugs. Yeah. And the boss of the alcohol, this alcohol, which they made in there. Right, that's big business too. Which is pure, like 45% pure alcohol on moonshine. Yeah. Yeah.

So on each wing, you'd have a boss of each of these things and then an ultimate boss and then the three brothers. Yeah. So pyramid. Really organized. That's unbelievable. And they put 10 cents on every bottle of Coca-Cola or soft drink that came into the prison. They would charge each shop,

a certain amount that they a license fee to operate and if any if they found anybody else selling drugs because they packaged it in their own packaging color coded all the rest of it if they found somebody dealing drugs that shouldn't have been like that they brought the smoke of their own drugs and they'd probably end up dead they would kill them so they were a proper government oh yeah they they were the law in there right and all that they had all of the guards paid off the director of the prison and if any body like the guards or the director went against them or tried to break them up, they would assassinate them. So they had no problem killing guards? Oh, no, they would kill guards.

As soon as they came out the front gate, the prison, I mean, a lot of them had grown up in the same barriers, the same district as these guards. So they knew what they lived. They knew where their families were. So they'd either kill them at home or they'd wait until they came out the front to all the prison. They'd have a motorcycle or a car out there and they'd just gun them down. They killed three directors of the prison whilst I was there. And then this other gang came in, the Los Charoneros, who had now one of them. The most powerful. Yeah.

They were on my wing. They came into my wing. I became really friendly with Jose Luis Zambrano, who was nicknamed Raskina. So what about the getting back to foreigners, the extortion? Yeah. So they'd have that little auction between the bosses of the, of, all of the wings and whoever bid the most

would get the prison there and the opportunity to extort them so they would take them back to whichever wing had paid the most for them to the guard they would then extort the hell out of them they'd get you in a cell, they'd put a gun to your head, they'd electrocute you,

they'd drown you in buckets of water and in this prison you were open 24-7 the cells all night all day all night because they were paying in the guards. Yeah. It was like that.

So the bar's never closed. You'd lock yourself, you'd lock yourself in yourself. Right, right. She didn't get logs in. When you'd had enough, you'd lock your door. You'd make sure it was fucking well locked.

Yeah. Yeah. Right. You'd get locked on the wing at about 5pm. They'd do roll call. They check everyone was there. And if people disappeared, they'd just take you off a list.

No big deal. Yeah, people just disappeared in there. They, they, if, you know, honestly, I saw people get killed in there. Hacked to death, blown up by hand grenades, shot, poisoned, electrically drowned. Yeah. Every which way you can think of.

And they would then burn the bodies, bury them, put them down the drains, you know. Cut people up. Yeah, cut them up, dismembered them, put them in the rubbish. So if you were a foreigner that didn't have connections like you or didn't have money to pay, how would they store you? I'll give you. I'll give you. I'll give you.

A Russian guy came in who I became really good. Right. He was actually Ukrainian. Ruslan Chavchenko, like Ruslan. If you're not dead, or back in Ukraine, find the Russians.

Yeah, dead. Find the good fight. Yeah. Because he was ex-military. He was a field doctor. Um, but he was part of the Russian mafia as well. And he came in.

He was in the first time for 400 kilos. Mm. And the first time he came in, I think they extorted him for, I don't know, about 15 grand. Mm. Second time he came in was for 42 tons.

Wow. So he's doing 25. No, 42 tons. Sorry, it was more than that. Yeah, yeah. Oh, you go. Okay. So he's basically doing life.

Well, no, I think they got, he bribed a few people. They got it down to 16. But him and his boss, because his boss had come over, they literally got five containers full of cocaine in molasses. So it was in liquid form. Again, they were on to the impregnation liquid shit. Yeah. because they knew it was.

But how would a guy like, just say a mule, right? Like Oscar, somebody who didn't have a lot of money. How would the gangs use them? I tried to educate. I tried to stop the gangs doing this because I'm going to try to educate them on this. I said, look, all these Romanians that are turning up in there, Bulgarians, they're coming from countries that are really poor that don't have any money that are fucked. They're doing this because their families at home have no money.

Right. They don't have any money. that you can extort from. Because they're fucked. You know, not every country in Europe has loads of money. I'm from Britain, yes, a wealth country. Brits do, yeah, some better countries in France, Germany. Yes, maybe.

But generally, drug mules, bearing in mind, I wasn't a drug mule, don't have money. That's why they're doing it. And they just couldn't get it. They didn't care. So I remember one particular guy from Spain. Oh no, Romania. He was Romanian. And his screams would wait me up.

They were tortured him 24 hours a day for about two weeks. And I remember one guy ended up dead because they used to call it a submarine, drowning you. They would drown you, bring you up, electrically, drown you a bit more electric at you. And they obviously went too far. And then they'd just string you up and say to the guard. He died. He killed himself.

He made him off. Wow. And no, that would be it. They'd just take them out. They'd take them off. So, so they would, would it be an ongoing extortion? Or if you could get your family to wire in money, would they leave you alone? It depended on who was running the wing at the time. Yeah. Some bosses would be okay. Others would be fucking out. Could you do favors? Could you say, hey, I don't have any money, but like, I'll put in some work? Yeah, sometimes, sometimes they would get people to do things like that. Yeah. So you were very lucky. Yeah, I was lucky. that they didn't take anything off you. Basically, I bought a cell off of them. In Quito, you could resell yourself. In Guayaquil, they would just take it back off you at the end. Or if they didn't like you, they'd just take it off you anyway and then resell it.

So to keep them happy and, you know, to grease the wheels bit. You spent a little money with them. I spent a grand, grand and a half, bought a cell, you know. You know, every week on a Sunday was like the day of all the shops would come around. and collect any debts or the drug dealers would come around and collect any debts.

So Sunday was debt collection day and tribute day. So every person on the wing would have to pay five or ten dollars to the boss. Okay.

They would then pay a certain amount to the... The boss, the triangle, the brothers. Exactly. So you kick in

a little bit on tribute day. So they were making mega money. You imagine as well. All the cocaine they were selling. I think we

were to me and a guy sat down one day and we tried to work out roughly because you know I ended up involved with the cocaine I was selling it for the Chorneros on our wing for a while yeah and we sat down and kind of tried to work it out I can't remember how much it came to

but it was it was like a million dollars a week or something million dollars yeah something like that it was it was you imagine just selling coke in prison no no like everything yeah the bottles of coke because on a visit day they could have as much each prisoner could have as many people coming in as you wanted. So you'd have like 30 people coming in to see one prisoner. The prison was absolutely packed at the weekend.

Right. And all the bosses had massive restaurants with like 100 tables and they'd be absolutely heaving. And cash is just going through. You imagine 10 cents on the bottle of E? On each bottle of Coca-Cola, how many bottles of Coca-Cola and the fancy got sold at the weekend? Right.

Plus food. Yeah, plus all the drugs in the week. drugs and all the alcohol and I mean you're talking just you start working it out right all the kilos of cocaine that they were selling in there in there I asked Oscar I asked Oscar why

why do these bosses they're so rich why are they still in prison and he was like well actually they're safer in there yeah yeah in many in many ways they make more money in there because it's easier you can control a prison a lot easier than a whole city that is that yeah that's exactly right they were happier

in there yeah because they had their gang in there. They have more protecting in there. They have people wandering around with, you know, they would move with 50 or 60 bodyguards around them. All with 9mmers. A couple of guys carrying machine guns in the rucksacks. Hand grenades. I saw a kilo S4 in there

with debts, electronic debts. And I sat down with them. And one day, and they had all these weapons out on a kilo of C4. And I looked at them and I said, guys, why the fuck are we still sat here? Why don't we blow the wall? lay down a bit of covering fire against the police and get the fuck out of it. A few months later they did that

on out of what, they built a maximum security prison called the Rocker, named after Alcatraz. And they put some of the Choneros in there and 16 other Choneros managed to escape out of that and they did exactly that. They blew the external wall,

kidnapped some of the guards and they had speedboats waiting on the river dowel. I think it was cool. And they went down there because a lot of fishermen or came from fishing backgrounds on the coast. And they all went to different countries around South America. But they tracked them all down.

Wow. They tracked them all back. Yeah. So can you explain a little bit about your Coke, your involvement in the Coke traffic in there? Yeah. When the Torneros came in, they kind of took over the wing that I was on.

And that... Was that violent? No. But it turned violent. And that's when the... there was that gunfight that I was in the middle of because obviously the Cubanos didn't like the fact that this third really power.

At that time, they weren't so powerful. They were just up and coming. And the Cubanos didn't like the fact that they were starting to take the prison over. And they were trying to form a partnership and do it nicely. And they were, I'd call them a better class of criminal. They were sort of more educated.

The Cubanos? Yeah. No, no. And those John Areles? Oh, interesting. You could talk to them more. They were, they seemed. You could reason with them.

Yeah, they were much more, they were fucking stone cold killers. Right. I mean, Ruskina Hotheli, when he first came in, he was only like 26. He killed 86 people himself. Because his brother, Carlos, lived in the town in front of me, supported Chelsea. I supported Chelsea Football Club. And we used to spend so much time together. And I'm still in contact with him now.

And so I became really good friends with him. and you know and so what do you mean is there better classes of criminals what are you talking about because the Cubans were kind of like street level thugs yeah robbing people

you know they were they were robbers they were thieves they were scally rugs sure you know whereas the torn eras were more organized they were better you could just tell they were better educated

and a slightly higher class more more educated you could just talk to them they were more like me than the other people. Yeah. You know. And I got on with them. So did they,

the Cubano's have a problem with you now going with the Chinatos? Exactly. So, yeah. Yeah, they kind of did. So as time went on and the tension builds up, they,

the Cubano sent in a hit squad to kill, to take out Hotta Healy, Jose Luis, or Raschina, as they called him. And a couple of the, well, killers, many of years.

as they could. And I was living in this cell on my own because I paid them to make sure because, you know, I'd like to sell to myself. And I had a German friend that evening. It was about 9 o'clock and I was cooking spaghetti bolognese. And I didn't have to this German guy. I was called Peter as well. So we were both sat there having a drink, doing a bit of Coke and having a chat and whatnot. And I had my door open. But normally, Everybody's doors would be open. There'd be music playing, everybody would be getting high.

And there was like a party atmosphere, always in the evening. Loads of people milling around. And this evening was hardly anybody around. Everybody's doors were shut. And there were these little groups of people huddled, talking, having these whispered conversations. And I was like, what the fuck's going on?

And being sort of a bit oblivious to what was happening. Because obviously, me being with the children errors, we didn't realize there was a fucking assassination attempt about to happen. I was starting to read the signals and see the signs. And I said to the gym, I said, something's going on

because it's really quiet tonight and there's always a little weird conversations going on. Literally, our door was about one of the only open doors on that entire wing. And there was a group of the Cubanos in the entranceway to the wing

in hammocks for about 10 of them. And all these other little groups dotted about the wing. And I'd gone down, I know, one of the Cubano, Choneros had come up to me, Gato, his nickname was. He was kind of like,

Hot Ellies, right-hand man, lived in the cell next door to him. And he'd come up to myself, and he said, oh, can I have some of the food you're cooking because it smells nice? And, you know, they kind of like to taste the European food. So I said, sure, no problem.

You know what I mean? I'll come and get your plate when it's ready. So when it was ready, I went down and got his plate, got the food. And they'd obviously been watching me. I said hi to the lot. Because I was friends with both sides. And I said hi to the guys in the gateway.

And, you know, they all knew me. And they caught me local repeat. Because, you know, because I wouldn't take any shit in there. And, you know, when people tried it with me, I would fight back. And, you know, I had a knife and stuff. Did you have a gun? Not there because it was only the gangs that they kept it to be pretty tightly controlled

or that sort of stuff. But I wouldn't take any shit unless it was from the gang and then it was a bit touching courage. Right, sure, sure. But anyway, so I've said hello and whatnot and I get this plate of food and they've obviously been watching my movement and they saw it as an opportunity to get at this guy.

So as I come back down with the plate of food and I knock on his door, one of them's come up behind me, and as the guy opened the door and I've handed in the plate of food like I hand the plate of food to you this guy's shot from behind me over my shoulder

past my head shot the guy straight in the face blew the back of his head out he shot him twice in the head there and like there and just the back of his head came out spaghetti's gone everywhere as well at the back of his head

and I'm just like what the fuck and I didn't even look I didn't even turn around to look what was going on. I just went, ran straight for myself. Yeah. Shut the door. The fucking Germans, open the door.

Because quite often people would just get killed and that would be it. They'd get assassinated. But this was a wholesale gunfight at the OK corral. And I said, what the fuck you didn't get back in here? Because the door was only wood. So I dragged him back in the cell and shut the door. And all hell broke loose out there. Jose Luis came out and another guy

what was his name? I was Metriah. I think it was Matriah. I can't remember his name anymore. So the two of them came out and two of them fought a gunfight against about 12 or 14 of the Cubanas up and down the wing.

And they managed to get a hold. the two Torneros, Jose Luis Sanbrano and the other guy managed to get hold of the head of this

assassination group that like the main the boss that was now installed on the wing the guy called they called it Negropolia

this big black guy who I was friendly with as well and you know and you can sort of see death in people's eyes a couple of days before I'd been talking to him

and I saw death in his eyes and I think you he was going to die i don't know how that instinct that people have yeah and i just saw it in his eyes it real weird looking it and so now they're shooting up and down the tier like this in the cell block they're shooting back and forth so bullets if you're in your cell bullets are whizzing past they were hitting my fucking door wow things were hitting my dude were you on the deck crumb again they they they were hitting the they things were hitting my door and i was worried about bullets coming through the door.

And there was like a partition wall, low partition wall between like the living area of the cell and the kitchen and the shower area in the back. But the windows were all open. There was no glass. It was just bars because it was hot there. And I said to the gym, and I said, get behind that wall.

And we both got down behind the wall. And I said, keep an eye on the window in case because I was so in with the Chon Aeros. I thought, fucking out. I think somebody might even try and kill me. Do you what I mean? They were trying to kill all of them. Right.

And things were hating my door. Yeah. And I was thinking fucking out, man. I mean, this is it. And I said, keep an eye on the window and make sure if you see any movement outside in the yard. Because the guards would get paid off to let people. I'd heard of people getting killed. They would, the guards would let people out at night to come out.

Shoot through the bars. Yeah, shoot through the window in the cell. Right. And sometimes that's how people would get killed. So I said, keep an eye on the window. I'll keep an eye on the door. And it went on for two hours, two and a half hours. Two and a half hours, it was.

Wow. It started at about 9.30. Wow. How many people got killed? Three, two or three. Three, I think it was. And then they got a hold of this black guy for the Cabanas. Yeah, so that's what I was saying.

So they got a hold of the black guy and they said, oh, we got a hold of your boss. We're going to fucking kill him. And they'd shot him twice in the stomach. He was begging for his life. He's going, oh, please don't kill me. I've got family. I've got kids. And they were shouting to the other Cubank.

Rannas, there we go, we're going to kill this motherfucker for about half an hour. And then there was a couple of bangs and they shot him in the head, blue, just killed him. And obviously, I have a few of those ends. So that hit wasn't successful. The hit squad, they couldn't take him out. So after two and a half hours, Jose Luis and the other guy went back in their cells and locked the doors because it all started to calm down. And what the police would do is they'd wait for it

to calm down. They wouldn't come in whilst the gunfire was going not wait for the ammunition to run out or for it to calm down. And it ended up with just one of the Cubano's because obviously that boss, that black guy had been killed. So this other guy sort of instilled himself straight away.

Wandered up and down the wing just firing a revolver over and over again. And he was, I heard him a couple of times out I saw myself, open up the revolver and the shells hit the floor. And then load again going, fuck you, Choneros, you all a bunch of pussies come out and fight me. I'm out here of my own you know

bang bang bang and I mean in an enclosed space deafening it's loud there's gun powder smoke gun smoke all around the

I know for a fact Jose Luis came out because he had a chrome 45 and a 9mm so there was a 45 and a 9mming going off

and the other guy came out with an oozy as I heard it go off you know that yeah and yeah hand grenades going on.

It was fucking like. It was war. It was war on the wing. So then what, how did, what became of that? Was there a truce afterwards or? Well, as I said, it died down after about two and a half hours. And then we heard the police start to encircle the wing. And that was almost worse. Because they got us all out the cell, started torturing everybody until they found out.

They started, they went around and found anybody with any gunshot wounds or any wounds. or any wounds got all those they got the bosses side discharging guns up against their heads drowning them to find out who had done what

I mean they were fucking pissed did they kill anyone no they didn't kill anyone but they came close right but I bet they got to think twice before they kill somebody there was one occasion

there was one occasion where they did kill a boss the police they came in and in front at the weekends obviously there were families living

in the prison there when I first got there. And, you know, every other weekend you could have your girlfriend to come in and stay overnight and stuff like this. And one weekend in front of this guy's family and the wife and the kid, they dragged this guy out of his cell, took him out in the exercise yard and said, we've had enough of your fucking bullshit.

And his wife screaming and shout and saying, please don't kill him. And they've just executed him in front of her in the yard and then just drag him. amount. Anarchy. Absolute. That was the police. I know. Absolute lawlessness. Oh yeah. Totally. Wow. Okay.

So they split up. So they drag, so they've tortured everybody for about another two and a half hours. They drag the body. What do they do to you? Well, they just went along, hating everybody. They could see you weren't involved though. Yeah. So they've got us all lying down on the floor, hands over our head, you know, like for about two and a half hours. hours they went on. And they actually, after beating us all, they heard it about 130 of us into

the space of a prison cell, which was like the, there was an exit out into the exercise yard, which was the width of a prison cell. And that's where they killed this black guy. And about half of it was full of his blood because he's quite a big guy and he'd bled out for half an hour and then afterwards. And the smell, you know, a lot of blood, that's iron smell. That's the smells. It's the smells I'll never forget of people getting cut up and like they're in trials and just the smells of it's just bad. And they heard of this and there was about 130 bits on the wing at that time into the space of a cell like I don't know, six feet wide by 10 feet. 130 of you.

130 of you. It's packed. It's in where this guy had been killed as a lesson. And I remember my trainers got soaked in blood to about that deep and ruined the trainers. Obviously, I threw him away afterwards. Poor guy. And then they cat and nine-tail whipped us. And as we came back out, they got us all back out. And as each one came out, they got a nine-tail whipped us out into another area of the wing. Then they sat us all down.

They said if this happened again, it won't go down as well. we were all come in and start shooting because they had before. There have been gun fights between the police and the inmates. I mean, yeah, so they took out that Chornera's out of the wing and that's when things got really bad for me. Why? Because they, now the Cubanoes are mad at you.

Yeah, because all the Cubanoes then took over again. And they put in three bosses now jointly in that wing because there been so much trouble. Right. And they went around every single cell and anybody that has had anything to do with the Chorneros, I could hear them going round the cell, knock, knock, knock, around the wings, sorry,

going knock, knock, knock, knock, knock, bang, bang. People opening up, people screaming because they'd lock the wing down, the gang. People, so they could do this. People screaming, people getting beaten, and then they were just taking the cells off and everything off them, throwing them out of the wing. And because the prison authorities gave the Chorneros

a wing of the road to try and prevent this. So then they'd send these people down to that wing. So as they were going around the wing, I could hear them getting closer and closer to my door. And I was thinking, they're going to come to me. I know it for sure because I'd been working. Because I was so friendly with the Toronto. And they were getting closer and closer.

And there was a tap, tap at the door. And I thought, that doesn't sound like the Charoneros. And there was this woman called Mercedes. Hi, Mercedes. She's not watching this. Anyways, go ahead. She might be. But anyway, she's Ecuadorian, worked with the church,

and she was like an angel. She would come in, bring in shopping for me and just helped out foreigners, basically. And it was her, because she had clearance to come in any day. And she's seen it on the news. And she just by luck happened to get in in time before they reached myself. And she came in, and they had so much respect for her,

even this lot, because she helped them as well. Right. that when they got somewhere cell and there was a bang bang bang at the door I opened the door and there was about 30 of them out there ready to come for me yeah guns out everything and as soon as they saw they put the you know put the guns put on their backs and they looked in and uh and one of them said to the others oh we'll come back to him and uh and you know and they cleared off and i think they would have killed you or would have just taken later on later on later on on after she'd gone they i don't think it was that day but it was like a couple of days after or something

the worst of the three of them got me in his cell and i walked in the cell and there was a big guy called armanda who i got on quite well and i didn't see him but it was behind the door and as i walked in the door shut behind me and he was fucking massive and he was like the guy that they'd get and he would choke you out and he's behind me and i think this isn't good and the boss was there and he's drinking and he's sniffing coke and I can see he's high and that's the worst kind of time

you're going to be trying to negotiate with someone and he says I can't remember exactly what he said but he said it came to the point where he said oh we're going to kill you and I sort of thought me being me

not taking any of shit I said well go on then try it and he turned to our mandarin and he said go and get three guys come back and we're going to cut this guy up and he said it's so cold and dead pan. I thought, fuck, he actually means this. And Armanda went out and locked the door behind him.

And I thought, he's gone to actually get some guys to fucking do this. And I thought, fuck. And now I've really put myself in it. And I said, look, I said, you know, like, chill the fuck out. You know, I was only joking. And I think I ended up paying about a grand, a thousand dollars. Well, something like that anyway. to, you know, placating.

Do you think that was the closest you came to death? That was pretty, well, like out of everything that has happened up to this point? That was pretty close. I mean, I ended, in keto, oh, no, that was in Guayaquil. There was another gunfight on another wing. After that, I ended up moving upstairs

because there was another wing above that one. But they were all single stories. It was a two-story building, but the wings were one story. So the wing above it, they ended up sort of making a wing for foreigners. And because they were giving me so much shit downstairs, it was becoming unbearable.

So secretly, I moved myself upstairs gradually. Oops, gradually. And then suddenly paid the hefty to gear. I paid him off myself. And I'd done a deal with the boss upstairs and moved myself upstairs. They were pissed off about it because they didn't want it.

How were you accessing money? Were you still having people wire you stuff in? Yeah, yeah. I was getting money wired over. Okay. Yeah. So that was, at least you had something socked away for emergencies. My money, my personal money, the money that I'd built up lasted me six years.

And you can imagine I'd spent $120 grand on lawyers and whatnot. Right. And bought five sales and key to spend quite a lot of money. Right. But that kept you alive. Yeah. So it kept me alive. So now at this time, how far into your stretch are you at this point where,

you fall out with the Cubano's and you move upstairs. Oh, God. So I was in Kito, two years. That was probably in about another two years. So about four years. Four years? And you're off of a 12. Yeah.

Okay. Yeah. So I move upstairs. It's a lot calmer. Well, I say that's a lot calmer. Basically, the prison started a policy of trying to disband all the gangs. And what they were doing was they started taking out all the bosses of of the gangs, like the boss of each wing,

they would try and take them out and they would send them off to another prison into the jungle or wherever they could. And the effect that that had was actually to destabilize the whole situation. So it got even worse. Because it got worse because there was no law because the gang was the law and kept all the stability.

And so it became completely lawless and anarchy. People started bringing in their own drugs. People started murdering whoever they wanted, whenever they wanted. And it became absolutely lawless. And that was when they shut it down eventually. Their career, Correa got sworn in.

The president of Ecuador. Yeah. And he built a whole new prison estate. The prisons that you now see on TV. La Roca specifically. Well, no, La Roca was already in existence. Yeah, that was already in existence. But yeah, like the new style once you,

you all see on the news. Where it's like American style. Yeah, exactly. Everybody, there's nobody has favors. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. I mean, look, they're always going to be favors. But you know what I mean?

It's, it's revered back to what it was before. It's all gang run. It's all, I mean, there's more weaponry in there than there was before. Really? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Also, it didn't work. You saw the matter. It worked initially.

Okay. We all got transferred on mass. So I was up in upstairs for about another, I don't know, two, two, three years. years, something like that. In that time, my mum died, my auntie died. One of my best friends got killed, English guy, because Steve got hung, because he owed the gang like 150 grand. Back here? No, in the prison. In the prison. In the prison. A phone dwarfed down from me. Wow. Yeah, they said, you got it until this day because he was going to get released on parole. And he was begging the embassy to get him out of there. And they said it was a Monday. And they

basically they turned up they hung him they choked him out and they hung him they strung him up on a hookup in the middle of his cell and they and they said he was a suicide he wasn't all this it how did he run up that debt he'd been he did have 25 years he'd got it down to 16 and then he was getting out after doing he'd done nine years was he using no no no no how did he wrung up the debt so he'd run out of money he'd run out of funds so he was desperate to get out of there so he was he'd done out of there so he owed just extortion extortion payments. No, no, no.

He did business with them. Oh. I said, Steve, do not do business with the gang because whatever happens, you're going to end up paying. They can say they've sent it and they won't have sent it.

Or if it gets seized by the police, wherever you're still going to end up paying it. You will pay. Whatever happens, you're going to end up getting fucked. And sure enough, that's what happened. But you were so desperate to get out of there. I think he lost his head to some extent.

Certainly lost his neck. He did. Sorry, Steve. Yeah. Okay, so you never did business that deep with them. Not in the gang, no, no. Yeah. You just did business on your own and kicked up.

Well, no, with the Choneros, I did. But, yeah, not with the Kubernetes. And not to that. Right. I mean, I'm talking to exportation business. Oh, wow. Yeah, yeah, that's why the debt is a serious. Right, right.

And you can't, there's so many things you can't control. Exactly. especially as a foreigner. I was like, yeah, totally. I was like, what the fuck you do? I think there is something about Brits. You guys are the ones that go, uh,

fucking, there's something crazy about you. You guys go skydiving. You swim cagedless with great white sharks. Yeah, yeah, you guys do all this wild shit that Americans don't do. Like,

we're supposed to be the stupid ones, but you guys are crazy and stupid. Like you're, it's like, how, you know, How fucking dumb are you? You're not getting out of the country.

Like, who are you? You're not getting to the airport. And I think that's because, like, I don't know, it's, we grow up in a system of blood. It is, it is. There's something about being on this rock that makes you guys want to take these crazy adventures. I think it's because Americans are very close to death and law and order as well. Like, an American, even an American criminal, if he was in prison in Ecuador, he would be like, okay. There were a few Americans in there.

Right, but not as many as like Europeans or Brits. No. I would assume. No. And like even, even... I never saw any Australians. Never any Australians. Interesting.

But they do a lot of that crazy shit too, especially because the price of Coke is so high out there. But I think like Oscar was like, I'm just trying to make it home. Like there's no way I'm going to get away with anything. You know what I mean? And he almost got killed still, right? So, but you had the wherewithal to at least not like,

you were just moving coke and paying a tax to the bosses. I've always said this. I think the way that I survived in there more than anything was that I can talk to anyone from, I mean, I actually met Rafael O'Corea twice, once in Kito or once in Gua, or through the bars, because he came into the prison to try and get the prisoner vote. And I actually spoke to him, and I was like, what are going to be for the foreigners like us? And he was like, oh, we're going to, you know, do the indoor tour and all that. Yeah.

But obviously, it didn't help me shit. Yeah. Yeah. And actually, whilst I was in Keito, the ex-president, I forgot his name now. The one that came back, he'd robbed loads of money. He ended up in prison with us for six months. And whilst he was in there, a typical politician, he was going, oh, yeah, when I get out, I'm going to run for presidency again,

and I'll reduce everybody's sentences. Yeah. When he got out, what did he do? He said, I'm going to up the sentences for everybody. I'm going to get this death sentence of sent him to introduce you. Fucking bastard. Fucking politician. I'm trying to remember his name now.

That's hilarious. Dude, it is absurd. The world in South America is upside down. Honestly, guards, there were guards in the prison who would be arrested for bringing drugs and firearms into the prison. Who would do their time, get out and become guards again? They would hire them. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

I don't want to hear anything about how South America is so fucked up because of the gringoes. It's your culture. guys. You got to figure something out. Okay. And to their credit, like, I don't know if it's credit or not, they see what El Salvador is doing with like this zero tolerance. Torture, basically, but it's like this. The Philippines kind of side that one, didn't they? Yeah. Duarte, or what was name? But he's doing extrajudicial killings. Like Ecuador, in terms of like the Supermax prisons. Excuse me, El Salvador. And I think. What, what they do in there?

Well, they're in there. I mean, just Google. Oh, yeah. I just have seen it. Like the shaved heads. Shaved hands, no clothing. You do your time in boxers. I mean, you could have done that. Most of us, you used to wander around the shorts anyway. Right. But they don't, they make, nobody gets their own cells. They put in a cell built for four men.

They put in hundreds. And it's literally like totalitarianism, right? You, you, uh. Well, that's what they tried in Ecuador when they built that new prison estate. And initially it was working. There were no drugs in there. There were no firearms in there. Right.

But as time went by and the guards, the corruption there's endemic from top to bottom, even Raphael Croir got sentenced to eight years in absentee of corruption. Crazy, yeah. And I mean, you know, I could tell who he's corrupts when I met him.

I mean, he kicked out the DEA that was the first thing he did from the base in Monta. I mean, what do you think? He was involved with the garrings in the prison and with the Choneros. He was heavily involved in whatever, I won't say it will, but you get the idea.

And so all that corruption eventually, all those rules went out the way somehow. Yeah. So as soon as the guards and the police established what they could get away with, then they started breaking, you know, they gave it a few months to establish how, what they could do. And then the flow of drugs died. And then the weapons. But, you know, people quite quickly started taking out the reflectors out, the lights,

shaping them into machetes and big knives. And people started getting killed very quickly. I mean, in the first week we're in there, there was like over 30 murders. Wow. Because they made the mistake. As people were arriving in the new prison, everyone was just getting stripped down, nothing, shorts, t-shirt, and like a bag of toiletries for us.

You couldn't bring any of the stuff from the previous prison. And that really did my head in because I lost all the letters from my mum who had died. And that was all, you know, I didn't give a shit about all the TVs, all the material shit, nothing. all I wanted was those letters and I couldn't even take them. That's what really pissed me off about that. I think also the reason that El Salvador, it hasn't unraveled their Supermax system

is because there's no drug money going through there. Ecuador is such a hub for drug trafficking. All of that feeds the prison and the inmates and stuff like that. I mean, yeah, exactly. You know, that's why when I was in there, I met some of us in a lower cartel. and that was the start of all of that. The Albanian, one of the biggest Albanian drug traffickers landed,

but whilst I was still in prison there. I can't remember his name now, but he's still in there. Okay, so how did you get out? How did you come home? Yeah, yeah. So my family basically, yeah, my family had had enough. You know, my dad was getting older. You know, my mum had already died.

My auntie died. My cousin died whilst I was in there, like, literally half my family died. Loads of friends. Did you know what had happened to your ex-girlfriend? You never heard from her, obviously. Well, I knew that she'd been sentenced and stuff like that, but, you know, I didn't speak to her again. And that affected you?

All this stuff. Yeah, I mean, you know, you know, seeing all the killing and needing to get killed myself and all the rest of it. And, you know, obviously, you know, I ended up with complex PTSD because literally living in a war zone. I didn't know every day whether that was going to be my last day.

That was one of the worst things there, is that you just did not know whether you were going to survive that day. It could have happened any second. Violence came out of nowhere sometimes. Hand grenades would come through the window sometimes and explode just to try and get somebody else. But you could get caught.

A friend of my got caught at his ankle blown off. They reattached it. But like you get... He's not running marathons anymore. No. Right. So, you know, it was just so dangerous. Had you developed like a really bad Coke problem? I would have been all over that shit.

Wow. So you, I mean, I've never. You dodged the addiction part of it. How did you psychologically, what took your mind out of it? I've read a lot. I've built up a massive DVD collection. So we'd program our own TV schedule. Yeah.

In the second prison. I mean, in the end prison, there wasn't, there weren't no TVs. It was a bit, it was similar to the places you're describing in El Salvador. So then what happened? What were the key elements to get you out? They'd had enough of it. And they already, I didn't really want to come back to Britain because, again, that was another bad thing.

All the way through, I didn't know what was going to happen when I got back to Britain. Because they hadn't said, yeah, you've done enough time or the cases closed in Britain. It was never, even to this date, they'd never, ever said because I was only charged for seven kilos there whereas the case in Britain was for 80. Conspiracy to be bought at least 80 kilos.

and four million pounds. And at no point did they ever say, oh yeah, okay, you've done your time, sufficient case closed. So in theory, sorry. You never heard, you haven't heard from them since. No, in theory, the case was still open. So even my family had me repatriated eventually.

I did nine years and about three months in total in Ecuador. And like I said, it got so bad. And there was so many people getting killed and all the rest of it. I got TB. That nearly killed me. I was really sick. Tuercculosis.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. I got injected with it. It was supposedly a vaccine, but they were trialing drugs on the inmates. Oh, my God. Yeah, so my family just, we'd started the repatriation process. It takes for fucking eminent.

It took about two years. You have to go through the embassy. Yeah, it goes back and forth, back and forth between Britain and the Ecuadorian government. Loads of paperwork back and forth. Anyway, eventually they signed it. A couple of prison officers came out from England, from good old England, London, to Ecuador.

They got a lesson, I tell you. When I got taken to the airport, there were four interpol officers in the car with me, all heavily armed, a Jeep behind, a Jeep in front, like military style, with all with machine guns, M16s, and hand guns just to take me to the airport. They shut down half the airport.

It was like being El Chapo. Right, right, right. I was like, and in the car, they were laughing on the way to the airport, and they were going, do you not like it? And I said, well, you know, sorry, but I'd rather be at home. And they said, yeah, we know, because you tried to escape. And that was the only point at which I finally found out the, that was definitely the reason that I'd been transferred to Guaicchio.

Right. Because I'd never really been 100% sure whether it was, you know, them trying to extort me or what was going on. Yeah. And Oscar said that. He said in, if you tried to escape from the Quito prison, Jose Moreno and you got caught, they would send you to the worst prison in Guayaquil. Yeah.

Yeah. Was it good to talk to your countrymen, even though you were in shackles? Was it good to talk to some English cats? Oh, me, like I said, there were a couple of English guys on the wing in Guayaquil. But, I mean, like I said, one of them, you're out dead. And then two years later, Ronnie, a Scottish. guy and he ended up dead in similar fashion because the embassy wouldn't believe i kept telling the embassy that they got they killed him right and the embassy were like no it was a suicide it was a suicide i was

like shut up the chairs were all at the side of the cells the knot he was there was no drop in the not his head was touching the ceiling right when we took him down even the guards were saying he's being killed yeah yeah and the embassy were like no suicide yeah denied it yeah i had to tell his daughters when I got out. I'm really sorry, but actually he was killed and explained to them what had actually happened. Right. And they were thankful for that because, you know.

Were you worried because at the beginning of your stretch, the Brits told you if you do any less than 10 years, we're going to recharge you? No, if I did, no, it was if I served any lesson six or if I was sentenced to lesson 10. I see. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. So you already

so I've done your time. I was on course to do 11. years out of the 12 was what I was going to do because they weren't going to give me any remission there. Right. So that's what I was going to do. I later found out. Okay. So you served a lot of time. They must have thought, well, this guy's done his time. Yeah. So I ended up in Britain back in once with prison, which is in London. Yeah. It did 10 months there. So I ended up doing 10 months and 10 days in total. And I was actually going to call my book 10 years and 10 days on the line, i.e. the equatorial line, the cocaine line.

I was going to have a picture of the globe and a line of cocaine running around the equatorial line. And then, you know, in the prisons, in that last prison, you have the lines like in American prisons that you followed to get from A to B. So, but the publishing company thought that was too intelligent and people wouldn't get it. Right, it probably is.

Why did you, what did they tell you when you got sent to Wadsworth? how much time were you supposed to do? Like why, I thought you were going free. Yeah, no, no, no. So I had to finish off like the, I can't remember how they calculated it, but it ended up I did 10 years, 10 months. Okay.

And even up until the day I got released out of once worth, I didn't know whether I was going to get what they call gate arrested, where the police are waiting for you at the gate and re-arrest you and say, we're going to take you and now charge you for 80 kilos. Right, now you've got the conspiracy charge to face. Honestly, on my day of release in Britain, you should be out by midday.

I didn't get released until 6pm. So every hour I'm knocking on the office of the wing office of the prison to ask the boss of the wing, you know, the prison officer. You know, are you sure there's not any warrants for me? There's no police waiting for me. And he kept going calm down. There's nothing. And I just couldn't believe him. And I was thinking, there's got to be something wrong.

I said, well, why haven't I been released? And he said, I don't know. got to 6 p.m. They kicked me out of the door with 30 quid or whatever. On you go, jolly boy. Wow. Wow. Good job.

See you later, I'll chat. Good job. Off a cup of tea. Wow. Wow. I was like, you fucking wankets. Did the family show up to pick you up? Did your dad pick you up?

No. Oddly enough, when I left France, my dad took me to the train station for that fateful last trip. And he said, goodbye to me and he knew I wasn't coming back

something and he said you know there was something he knew and I got on the train to go to Paris

from our local trade station in France and I went up to Paris did loads of crazy shit in Paris changing money

on the chandeliz loads of dodgy business flew out to Ecuador anyway so I had a train journey there and then

at the end I get released out of Wandsworth and a Scottish girl that I'd met over in Ecuador, who was a professor of criminology, met me. And honestly, I had a culture shock in Wandsworth.

When I got back to Wandsworth, I was the only happy prison in the whole of Wandsworth. There were people wandering around the exercise yard, nearly crying. One guy was crying, and it's so bad, and it's terrible. I was going, this is fucking great. This is a TV, this running war.

I know I'm not going to get a shot. I'm going to be alive at the end of the day. I know when I'm getting out. Yeah. There's rules. This is fucking ace. I'm loving it. And there we go.

People are looking at me again, you're mental. What the fuck is wrong with you? But honestly, I had a real, I thought, coming back to my own culture because I'm British, I won't have culture shock. Yeah. I did. Wow. Because, I mean, you imagine in 10 years, Facebook didn't exist when I went into prison. WhatsApp didn't even exist.

None of that. Yeah. All of that had come online. The internet had taken over the world. All the pubs in Britain had closed down. The whole culture had changed. Right. Not just a few buildings and roads have gone up and changed.

Yeah. The whole culture changed. Yeah. Everything. Yeah. Half of Africa and Europe live in Britain now. You know, like it's wild. Yeah.

Well, not so much in that way. But like... Yeah, the development. London has sprung up like crazy. I suppose I also got used to... In Ecuador, if you had anything left on your plate, like food, you'd offer it somebody because it was so much. poverty. Right. And here there was so much waste, so much waste is like a food getting thrown

away at the end of, you know, when we got fed in the prison, there'll be half a bin of food getting thrown out. I was like, and it was sometime not before, not long before Christmas, so all the Christmas advertising was on TV. And it was just really overwhelming. And, you know, all the consumerism. Yeah. And packaging on everything. It was just, It just blew my mind. It took me a long time to get used to it. And also the seasons, because being on the equator, every day is the same.

Just sun goes down, something comes up, sun goes there. It's hot. It's hot, muggy all the time. A little bit less hot. Yeah. Hot as fuck again. And here, it was, and suddenly it's getting dark,

like four o'clock in the afternoon. And I'm like, what the fuck's going on? Yeah. You know, you think I spent nearly a quarter of my life. life. Well, it was. It was a third of my life in Ecuador. I was 29 when I got arrested and 39 when I came out. Wow. Wow. You must have been so happy to be home. Yeah. Oh, yeah. So I got a train from London back to Stroud where I live in Gloucester and my dad was waiting for me. So it was like one big journey. That's right. And then I had to, so read the book. There's a lot more in there. Trust me. So you went back to where it all started. Yeah.

So what year was that? You got out? 2015. Okay. And... 2005, a girl rest. Wow. Wow.

And since then, you paint houses and... No, you do... It's more than that. What do you... Explain what you do now? I'm a hand-paint... Well, say, like, really expensive hand-fitted kitchens. I go in and hand-paint them at the end.

Yeah. It's really delicate work and very intricate. In fact, I've got to go back to the job tomorrow that I'm working on to finish it. Wow. Wow. Is that pretty good business? Do you enjoy it? Well, it's actually two old acquaintances. One good friend and one acquaintance, who I knew from back in the day, one made a lot of money through an internet business,

and now it's like an angel investor. Yeah. So put the money up for this kitchen company to be started. It's great. Yeah, they're making good money. I make all right money. Yeah, not like the old days, but. Yeah, but I would like to start in. importing cacao from ecuador because ecuador and cacao is some of the best of the world and i did get some samples in but you can imagine with me you know there's a lot of barriers to import stuff from ecuador especially that starts of the sea exactly you scare me you scared us feet do you feel like you you could have done it without the drugs you could have made all that

money and taken care of your mom and it would have taken longer if i had a if i'd have I had a, you know, I don't want to blame my upbringing, but, you know. No, but that's, there's a factor in that. If I'd have had a different upbringing and not, if my parents hadn't got divorced when I was 10, and I hadn't been exposed to drug use, which I was all throughout my childhood. And you were enabled by your father. Yeah, you know. Yeah, because, I mean, when he found out the first time that I've been arrested, you know,

he told me, he told me, you should, you should have done it bad, not like, you. Now that you shouldn't have done it at all. Yeah, yeah, yeah. She said you shouldn't have got caught. Move smarter. Right, right. So that earth was like, okay, I'll try a bit harder next time. Right.

So, you know, if I'd have grown up in, say, a more stable home environment where my mom wasn't having mental episodes every time she drank, which was almost daily after school and being exposed to all that, which was really difficult to deal with as a kid. Yeah. You know, I'd have probably been a CEO of a, of a large company that I'd started of some. Because honestly, I have so many business ideas I come up with.

And me and a friend that I'm a mate in Cardiff, we're always bouncing business ideas off each other still. And we've got so many ideas. But you imagine how hard it is for me to get financial backing to start one of these now. Because of your background? Yeah, background, credit record, all sorts of barriers. I mean, my microprudinal recommends the pages and pages, not just for drugs, for firearms, you know, all sorts of shit.

Yeah. Has there been temptation in these like nine years since you've been home? Has there ever been a time when you said, okay, I'll make this one little move? I always say that dealing drugs is more addictive than taking drugs. Oh, yeah. That's a catchphrase that I've coined. 100%. And a lot of people have come back to me after I've said that and said, that is so true.

Like the lifestyle, even if you're not taking them, just the actual dealing of drugs is so addictive. The buzz you get the adrenaline. I was addicted to dealing drugs. The adrenaline rush of beating the system, getting around the system and just getting one over on the system. Because I like to play chess when I was a kid and the strategy. And, you know, you can see that the whole. working out strategies of beating the system and getting drugs. And then that, you know, getting them in.

It's such a rush. Yeah. Because you're beating. I'm not trying to encourage anyone to do it because it's, you know, you're going to end up even prison, dead or fucked up. Some people succeed, but not many. Most people don't. Yeah, most people don't. So.

But yeah, that you had to. So, yeah, that's hard. How long did it take you? It took me about 10 years to let the game go when I got out. Yeah, so I was going to say that I, yeah, it is, it's like being an addict. There's always that temptation. You know, I could pick up the phone to date and bring up someone and quite easily get a hold of a ton of cocaine if I wanted in Ecuador. Really easily, you know, say I had the money and I wanted to do it.

Yeah. I could have that there. Yeah. But, you know, I don't want to come back to prison. No. Quite frankly. And I know in England, if I ever did anything again, game over. A is a third strike.

And I know, I think the rules will change slightly because they had those IPPs sentences here, which were like indefinite public protection. Well, they, you know, it's like a third strike rule in America. Right. But I think they would kind of apply that to me here. Sure. You know, three strikes. And they would throw, minimum 30 years probably.

Oh, definitely. Yeah. It would start to say. Your life would be over. Yeah, it would be finished. And like, you know. Yeah. It's just, yeah, fuck that.

Yeah, I think you're smart enough and capable enough to where you're now. Working it, you know, paint and decorating is a hard, it's hard work. I mean, you know, I've had cramped twice during the, and it's because I'm on my hands and knees quite a lot most of the day. My hands are still got pain on them. Yeah. And it's, you know, it's hard work, but at least I know at the end of the week I'm not going to prison. Have you? And the police aren't going through the door.

Have you forgiven yourself? How did you recover? from the complex PTSD and have you forgiven yourself for what has happened to your family and your ex-girlfriend? I don't think I'll ever forgive myself for what it, the hurt that I call my, my ex-girlfriend and her daughter, because, you know, she's suffered a lot as well. And my family, a lot, hell of a lot, you know, that will never go away. The complex PTSD, I went for some, for some therapy and it made things worse. I'd go in there and they tried to go in there and they tried to

all that REM. I don't know what it's called. I can't remember what it's called now. But they waved their finger at the time. They were waving their finger up in Dannyville in my face to replicate REM's, they sleep. Whilst I talked about the most traumatic experiences in my life. And I've had so much death around me. By the time I was 20, I'd seen eight people die in front of me.

Wow. I mean, how many 20 years or I've seen eight people take their last breath in front of I mean, honestly, I've had, my nickname became Grim Peter. Honestly, one of my friends in Carleth called me, no, sorry, in, anyway, in Wales, called me Grim Peter. Because it was like two or three people a month would be dying at me. Wow. And I'd just come across car accidents, heart attacks. Yeah.

Because I was out and about a lot. I've seen so much death, so much. Yeah. I would like to write a book about that, really. You should. Because I have. And, you know, it's just. it's not normal.

Maybe you try like, they do like MDMA therapy. I don't know if they do that over here if that's legal. Yeah. Yeah. There's got to be something you could do. Iowaska. Do you know what helped me more than anything was writing the book? Yeah.

That was kind of cathartic because I had to relive it all. And I think doing these podcasts to some extent because I talk about it again and, you know, relive a lot of it. Yeah. And actually, we never talked about all those massacres that happened in Ecuador. I mean, that's a whole note of story. Well, they can read about it if it's in the book. No, it's not. I mean, a lot of that happened after I left, but, you know,

I was sent a photograph if somebody holding my friend's head, you know, the decapitated head. I mean, you know, there was like 300 people killed in one day. Wow. When the Choneros went, men. Right. And that, I was going to come on to that earlier. That was all the Cinaloa cartel and the new generation,

Juleska cartel, for control of Guayaquil, the port city of Guayaquil, where that prison is. Yeah. And it's all playing out like a mini war like it is in Mexico in Ecuador, between the gangs that are affiliated for the trafficking. The move the Coke for them. Exactly. So it's all...

And you just dodged that. You got out a few years before all that went down. Yeah, I didn't. I didn't. I mean, you know, they were in there when I was there. But the massacres, I mean, think about the close calls. had. Like there's a reason you stayed alive. Yeah, yeah, exactly. That's, that's, yeah, you got to think about that, the destiny. You got to think about that, the destiny. Like,

like you dodged death, you should have died five times over. Oh, yeah, wait more than that. Yeah, yeah. Well, tell, tell them where you can get the book, man. It's on Amazon. Just look it up at Amazon. The name is, El in Funno, which is like, hell. Yeah, it's what they call prison in, in Equal, or hell, Elm Funnel, the whole place. Yeah. Ellen Fierano by Peter. Peter Tritton. Peter Tritton. Peter Tritton. I think it's one of the only books about Ecuadorian prison.

Well, that should be, I mean, it should be a movie and hopefully Netflix or a TV show. Because of so many stories like, you know, the build up to it, like the early years and, you know, honestly, I've got some mental stories. Yeah, man. I mean, that was unbelievable. Yeah, go get the book. The link will be in the description. Pete, dude. We had a great afternoon. Yes. Yeah, I've hoped you had some fun.

Yeah, yeah. I've hope you've released some emotion. Yeah, yeah. You know what I mean? You're a good shit, dude. Thanks. Thanks. You're a good shit. I really mean it, bro. You're solid, dude. Thanks. And I hope to hear from you soon and I believe in you. Thank you. You know what I mean? I remain optimistic eternally. So, you know. That's the key to life. That's it, buddy. That's it. All right, you guys. We appreciate you. We appreciate you. We appreciate Peter and we'll see you next time. Thank you.