The Underworld Podcast - BONUS PATREON EPISODE: Knives, Drugs, and Albanian Takeovers in London with Max Daly

Episode Date: October 7, 2021

Something a little different this week: No regular episode but we've decided to put the patreon bonus episode up for free. Max Daly, based in London, is the Global Drugs Editor for VICE. The Orwell Prize-winning investigative journalist has freelanced for The Guardian, BBC, Independent and other publications, and his 2013 book _Narcomania_ explored Britain’s booming drug scene. Sean spoke to Max about London’s drug and knife crime explosion, county lines—and how the government has failed to act—Albanian takeovers and something called ‘cuckooing.’ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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What's up, everyone? This is Danny Gold. I host the Underwell Podcast, along with my partner, Sean Williams. Just wanted to update our regular listeners because we didn't have a normal episode this week. We will be back next week with a really good episode that I'm very excited about. But for this week, we at least wanted to give you guys a taste of what you can get on the Patreon. Patreon.com slash the Underworld Podcast. So we put up a lot of interviews there with journalists, people involved in criminal life.

lifestyles, law enforcement, things like that. This week, Sean spoke to Max Daly, who's based in London. He's the global drugs editor for Vice, and he wrote a book in 2013 called Narcomania, which is about Britain's drug scene. Sean talks about London's drug and knife crime explosion, Albanian takeovers, and fun things like that. So if you guys want more of that, patreon.com slash the underworld podcast. $5 a month gets you tons of bonus episodes. For 10 or 15, we'll give you the script.

and all our sources and things like that. And yeah, hope you enjoy it. Next week, we will be back with a great one. Hello, welcome all to a bonus episode of the Underworld podcast. I'm your host, Sean Williams. I'm joined today, rarely, by a fellow Londoner, Max Daly, who's an award-winning investigative journalist working the drugs and crime beat for vice.

Max's book, Narko Mania, how Britain got hooked on drugs, came out eight years ago. And since then, he's been tracking how the UK's drug industry is becoming one of the world's biggest. And we're going to cover a whole bunch of fascinating things on this show, including county lines, so-called woke Coke, Albanians. Yes, Albanians.

I know you guys love that. And something called kukooing, which sounds a bit like cottaging, but I'm pretty sure it's different. So, first of all, welcome to the show, Max Daly. Hi, Sean. Good to be here. Yeah, it's a pleasure. So I think we were first chatting about doing an interview back in the early throes of the lockdown.

And you were writing about a lot about how the pandemic was affecting drug use in the UK. There was a story about drug dealers dressing up as NHS nurses, which is pretty crazy. What did COVID actually do to the industry? Did it change it a great deal? Yeah, I mean, I think when we were sort of monitoring this and seeing how, because you would have thought, you know, because the drug trade is, relies a lot of people traveling about on the streets, hanging around on the streets,

doing kind of delivering, you know, running around, giving each other bits and bobs. Then you think, you know, this has got to be massively hit by the severe lockdowns. And I think it was definitely affected like everything else. But what we found out, as per usual with the drug trade,

is that because people desperately want drugs and people desperately want to make money out of selling drugs, there will always be a way of putting those two together. And that's what happened. So you had drug dealers disguising themselves quite cleverly as delivery riders and nurses and people who sort of had legitimate reasons for being in the street, also taxi drivers.

So they were sort of just kind of working a little bit more sort of undercover being a little bit more clever. And also, you know, there was a lot of areas, you know, particularly around suburbia and slightly quieter towns and villages where you could still kind of meet people in parks and at the back of buildings and in alleys and no one would really notice if you kind of swift enough. So basically, and I spoke to a lot of long-term heroin users and crack users as well as the dealers. And even some heroin and crack users tried, some of them tried to use the lockdown as a chance to sort of give up because they thought, well, look, I'm finding it a bit of a hassle. It's not as easy as it was to get drugs.

I might use this opportunity to try and get off drugs. But when sort of normal service resumes sort of pretty quickly, they found that they could get drugs as easy as before. where a lot of them just immediately fell off the wagon and got back into it again. And in terms of what we saw sort of globally, again, you know, obviously it did impact things almost immediately in terms of, you know, the shipping from China and the Mexican cartels getting hold of their synthetic drugs to make fentanyl and things like that. So there was initial sort of problems, including the, you know, the Italian mafia,

getting the cocaine into Europe. They had to get around these problems. But like on the smaller scale of the little crack and herring dealers in London, the big suppliers and traffickers all had workarounds. They just tried to use slightly different routes. And obviously, they could still smuggle drugs in huge amounts of freight.

because also freight was still going on after it initially was sort of curtailed a little bit. But, you know, the freight trade was still happening. You know, that's why we could all still eat food and all the stuff. So drugs was just being even more cleverly hidden amongst, you know, the global exchange of goods. Yeah, and there's been a few. trends that you've been tracking over the last, what, a couple of years or so. It seems that they're more, they're more like international gangs, different kind of so-called ethnic gangs working in London these days or in the UK?

Yeah, so obviously in the in the, in the, in the, in the, when the drug trade in the UK started becoming a thing, a powerful thing, you know, in the, I suppose from the 70s and 80s and 90s, that's where the sort of the big crime guys in the UK started switching from armed robbery basically and all types of robbery and

fevery and that's where they started switching to the drug trade. You know, we can all, we saw what's going on in the Godfather books, you know, with the mafia clans going, oh yeah, let's maybe get into drugs because it's going to be the next

big thing. And Obviously, the drugs was the next big thing, and the UK gangs got involved with cocaine and cannabis. A lot of the armed robbers who had fled to Spain because Spain didn't have an extradition treaty with the UK. When they fled there in the 80s and 90s, they suddenly realized that more and more cocaine was coming into the Spanish ports from the cartels in South America. And they thought, right, we'll have a piece of this action. You know, as was, you know, hash coming into Spain from all parts as well. So they thought, let's have a piece of this action.

We'll get involved in drugs. Let's forget arm robbery, because arm robbery was also getting too tough as well. There was too much security. Banks were getting too wise into this. So a lot of the big gangs were involved in drugs. And hence, you've got... you know, the widespread and the price drop of cocaine because the supply was improved into this country.

And then what happens is because of globalisation and immigration, you start having other groups sort of muscling in on the action in terms of, you know, muscling out the traditional white crime gangs, especially in, you know, you know, more multicultural cities like London and Bristol and Nottingham. You had a lot of the Jamaican gangs getting involved in crack and weed selling. And then later on, you had the Vietnamese gangs getting involved in cannabis production, and then the Albanian crews getting involved in the cocaine trade, largely on the back of their already existing people trafficking trade.

So the Albanians were quickly just because they had started, like many other countries, like many other criminal gangs around Europe, you know, across Eastern Europe, they had increased connections with the cartels in South America. So the Albanians could go straight there and get the cocaine, and obviously one of the best markets in the world for selling cocaine is Europe and one of the best markets in Europe is the UK. It's very lucrative market.

A lot of people take a lot of Coke. It's a lot of money to be had. And the Albanians, they weren't, you know, a lot of people have said that they sort of took over the trade because they were like super crazy violent, which isn't the truth at all. They're no more violent than anyone else. They just got organized.

used existing trafficking routes that they had used to dominate Soho's sex trade, you know, in the 90s. And they also just did a bit of undercutting as well. You know, their labour was cheap. And they, like any new gang in the neighbourhood, they'll undercut the opposition to get an in-first. And they, you know, they've been fairly sort of popular in the underworld as operators, you know, reliable, good to work with. And now not only the Albanian successful in terms of the cocaine trade, but they've also shoulder aside the Vietnamese and are running the UK's cannabis farm trade as well in the main. Obviously, you also get a lot of white domestic gangs involved in that still. And also just, you know, one-off people who just want to grow weed.

But in terms of the organized kind of element of cannabis farms, the Albanians are quite heavily involved. They traffic poor Albanians and young Albanians over to the UK to work as sort of cannabis farms. slaves a bit like happened with the Vietnamese sort of 10 years ago. And you reported relatively recently that there's been a sort of uptick in the number of violent attempts to take over cannabis farms in the country and people are getting killed in that as well. So what's going on there?

Yeah, it's because I sort of keep an eye on Britain's drug world, I did start spotting, you know, and I look at a lot of the local newspaper headlines as well and get, you know, get a fair bit of information coming into my brain. I started sort of noticing that there was just a lot of violence associated with cannabis farms because you wouldn't sort of usually kind of think about cannabis farms and being particularly violent. You know, it's just people growing cannabis plants and then getting rid of it and selling it and then growing more and they just don't want any hassle. They just want to do their thing and go. But what I had found out actually from interviews,

viewing this guy a couple of years ago in, I think it was Kent, he was actually a professional cannabis farm raider. So it was his role, his speciality, and you have a lot of specialities in the criminal world. People get commissioned to do what they're good at doing. And what he was good it doing was raiding cannabis farms. So one of his mates or someone in the gang would get wind. There was a cannabis farm operating in XX Street. So what they'd do, they'd plan a raid on it. They'd maybe scout it out for a day or so,

work out how many people were operating from there and whether they might be armed and how dangerous they looked. And if they thought they had a good chance, they would, you know, raid it, usually at night, they'll break in, they'll burgle it, probably armed with knives or baseball bats. Sometimes kind of kick the shit out of the people who are working there or running it. Sometimes they just leave them alone or tie them up and just nick their whole, you know, cannabis farm, just grab the, you know, stick it all in lineers and shove it in the car and drive off.

and, you know, and obviously that's, you know, worth up to sort of 30, 30 grand or whatever, you know, at least per crop. So, so it's, you know, it's better than stealing an iPhone. And so because I've been speaking to this guy who made, made a living of it, you know, I think he burgled up to sort of 30 or 40, 50 cannabis farmers himself during his career, then I did also start spotting that the violence started increasing and that, and there was one particular case which I feature in that article

about a, I think he was a young like jujitsu champion for Britain, a young Asian guy and, you know, lots of pictures of him on the internet of winning at his sport and what he, him and a group of friends

decided they were going to burgle a cannabis farm up north. I can't quite remember where it was. I think it's somewhere in the Midlands, actually. And unfortunately for them, the people who own the cannabis farm happened to also live in the house next door and they were a group, a bunch of Asian guys as well. And they were armed with a crossbow. So they shot a crossbow and it killed one of the young kids. But he also, I who shot a crossbow, happened to also accidentally kill his brother, I think. think. So he was done for double murder.

And that's just one example of a lot of these quite nasty, you know, some of them deliberate murders of people who are just kind of being paid probably quite low amounts of money to look after these flipping plants. And usually they're sort of have to sleep in the same room. There's nothing they can do. They have like pot noodles. it's quite a grim life and then someone breaks in and stabs them. Yeah, so that's the sort of the nasty side of the cannabis trade.

And obviously it's a great argument for legalising cannabis because none of this stuff would happen if cannabis was legalized. Yeah, definitely. And I mean, another part of the news that, I mean, I've been away from the UK for ages, so I'm probably well out of touch, but we're fairly. a load of stories about county lines specifically how drug gangs are, you know, using young kids, teenagers to run drugs all over the country. Is that they getting younger? Like how is

county lines developing? I guess we should also describe the listeners what county lines even is. Yeah, so county lines is a sort of a drug dealing business model where you're sending out sort of inner city drug gangs are sending out young kids, usually teenagers, you know, sometimes as young as 12, 13, to go out to, it used to be called going country or going out there, OT. They would send them out to satellite towns and ports and stuff to just expand the drug trade out of the city. And they used these young kids because it was cheap labor because they were, no one really, really sort of bothered them because they were so young.

No, the local police forces had no idea that these young kids buzzing around town were anything to do with, class, say, you know, crack and heroin drug trade because obviously county lines is all about crack and heroin. It's not really much to do with cannabis or powder cocaine. So they'd go out these young kids, usually with a manager,

would go out and start selling to local, they'd take over the local heroin and crack trade. And what they found out over time was that they couldn't just wander around in the streets because the police kind of cottoned onto the fact that there was a lot of black kids from London wandering around Ipswich or wherever. So those kids were just picked up at the train stations.

So what happened next is that they had to find a sort of a drug den to sell from so they were off street. And what they did was that they took over dependent heroin users, council flats. They would pay them, you know, kind of a rock every couple of hours. And they can just sit in their house 24-7 and use that as a dealing hub. And so therefore be harder to catch. And this model, which I trace back to about 1999 in Brighton, when a lot of Brixton, young Brixton kids were selling a crack on heroin in Brighton.

So since 1999, that sort of method has expanded pretty much around the country with the use of these young kids, some of whom are perished into it, some of them are sort of really up for it. obviously if you're a kid, you know, you're going to be up for doing a lot of things that you probably shouldn't be doing and that are probably very dangerous. And, you know, and a lot of these kids have really come across where, you know, they are stuck in a, between a rock and a hard place. They've got the police on one side. They've got rival gangs and even their bosses on the other side. So ultimately, they're not really earning, they're earning more money than McDonald's,

but they're not earning any great riches. And in the end, they'll usually either come home with their tail between their legs after having huge beating to their mom and dad, or they'll end up in prison, they'll end up injured. So it's not ideal way of spending your youth, you know, when you should be doing biology, GCSE, you know, instead of, instead of sitting in a sort of a heroin user's real shitshole flat selling crack and heroin 24-7 with very little break. you know, all you're eating is McDonald's and playing games on your phone. I mean, it's not a very glamorous life despite what Snapchat and stuff might say.

Yeah, and you've been working on some stuff about that, right? Can you get into that? I think when this will be going out, the big story that we were talking about before we went on air, that will just be coming out of advice. Can you tell me a little bit more about the kind of reporting that you were doing for that? Ambition comes in all shapes and sizes. At First Citizens Bank, we roll with your goals because we're built for what you're building.

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Yeah, so since 2017 really, there has been a steady rise, apart from last year, which was lockdown. There's been a jump in the number of young people killing. each other. I mean, and the figures were fairly high. You know, I think the last high was 2008,

2009, when it was in the media a lot before, you know, then. But basically this year there's been 25 teenagers who have been killed in street stabbings and shootings

in London so far this year. And it, that's that sort of double what it was last year. Wow. And it's huge. Yeah. Yeah. And it has gone up.

And I think the record was something like 28, 28, 29 in 2008. So it looks like, because there was another three months to go this year. It doesn't look great in terms of being a record-breaking year for teenage killings. And the problem is, is that what I've been seeing in the last year in particular, was there getting younger and younger. So, you know, the year started off, I think it was January the 3rd, started off with the stabbing to death of a 13-year-old boy in Reading,

which is a, and quite a sort of a well-off part of sort of suburb of... Yeah, I went to uni in Reading, actually, so I know... Yeah, you know it well. I mean, and it was in this particular park. I can't know what it was called, but it's quite a sort of a well-off part of Reading. you know, total suburbia. And his sister,

a year old kid gets stabbed to death on January the 3rd. And it turns out, you know, the people who have been convicted of stabbing to death was a 13 year old and two 13 year olds and a 14 year old. He was sort of lured.

It was sort of very much connected to Snapchat. You know, the young guy's obsession with knives, the beef that was developed, the planning of it, the honey trap element of it where the girl persuaded Olli to go to the park on false

pretenses and then he got ambushed by the two boys who stabbed him to death. And that was, you know, that was to start that was three days into the year. Then, you know, since then there has been a steady I think it's, you know, one every

10 days, T's, you know, one every 10 days, a teenager is killed in London. I mean, it hasn't actually kicked off as bad as everyone thought it would this summer. But there still has been a steady trickle of people dying across the country at a very young age, and it's very young people doing it as well. It's not like it's sort of, you know, thugs in their 20s, like stabbing and bullying little kids. the ones who were doing the stabbing and killing are the same age as them. And there was that case also recently where there was a dad went to kind of rescue his girl,

14-year-old daughter who was being abused by some ewes, and he got stabbed to death in Chingford, I think, North London. And the kid who's been charged as 14. So it's just this sort of really, it's like what the fuck is going on? You know, why, you know, in one of the richest countries in the world, why are children on a regular basis killing each other on the streets? You know, a lot of them are killing each other on the way home school. You know, this isn't all stuff that's happening in dark alleyways and, you know, whatever.

This is stuff that's happening with kids in their school uniform outside of McDonald's, within full view of the public, and with flipping machetes, you know, we're not talking about Stanley knives, we're talking about absolute proper swords that people are getting attacked with. Yeah, and it's very open. I mean, I saw it the other day in my, in my street, some kids running after each other with machetes. and you know it's it's sort of it's almost you know you used to start seeing foxes all the time in London

and I remember thinking blind me there's a fox and now you see foxes everywhere and then now it's like literally you're not surprised when you see someone walking around with a zombie knife or being chased or a helicopter hovering overhead because there's another dead body in the street two streets away So what I thought, okay, well, what is going on here? Yeah. And I know that the authorities, you know, the home office, the Scotland Yard, all those sort of people have, since 2017, have tried to put the blame on the drug trade. And I sort of smelled a rat and I thought, hold on, that sounds like total bullshit to me. So I kind of investigated that and looked into the cases.

This is a few years ago I did a piece and found out that not very many of them were to do with drugs, turf wars. You know, it wasn't Britain was not, you know, London was not the wire. And that most of the time, as it would have been with kids, that these were like, you know, petty beefs and city arguments and sort of pointless postcode rivalries, which were not based on drug turf, but literally. based on no reason whatsoever. So a lot of it was almost quite sort of nihilistic. You know, people were just killing each other because, you know, because they just didn't care and because someone had slighted someone, you know, in street terms, they'd violated them.

So the only way that you can survive on the streets is by keeping your reputation above a certain level. And if it goes below a certain line, you have to do something to correct that. and you do that by stabbing someone and recording that sometimes on Snapchat so everybody knows what you've done. You've got your revenge. And yeah, and anyway, yeah. So very little to do with drug turf war and money and very much to do with this sort of weird situation now where it's a mixture of, you know, poverty. you know,

claustrophobic living, people developing these crazy little beefs over Snapchat, and then using that platform as a way of sort of a squad of keeping up with, you know, who's injured or stabbed who amongst rival groups. And then not only is it a sort of an enabler of it, then what you do is you boast about what you've done. on Snapchat afterwards.

And surprise, surprise, although the police aren't, you know, they haven't got enough resources to monitor Snapchat 24-7, but the police have, you know, use Snapchat evidence to nail people.

And obviously, so it's obviously stupid. No other, you know, 20 years ago, you know, like gang, gang people would never have gone to anywhere near something like Snapchat

because they know that it would put them in the dock. But these days, because they're kids, they just do not give a shit. You know, they literally do not care. You know,

the fact that they'll kill someone, they'll stick it on Snapchat and go, ha, ha, I've killed someone. Gives even more credence to this kind of nihilist side of it as well. Completely.

I mean, obviously some of them try and cover it up and some of them are a bit cautious, but there's so much, so many kind of convictions that I've been told about. that have involved evidence from Snapchat that, you know, they are kind of digging their own braver

as well as killing other people. And it's just, I mean, ultimately, I've been told by youth workers that it's a lot to do with shame. A lot of them have been shamed all their lives. They've had very difficult lives, a lot involving kind of domestic violence, in extreme poverty,

really bad treatment of the hands of schools and police, of hands of their own parents, and they've been shamed all their lives. And so, you know, if their sort of their tiny ego is dented at all or is challenged, they lash out because shame is a very powerful emotion. Yeah, and that's what, you know, youth workers have been telling me. Why Snapchat as well? Is it, or it's like safety features just lower than other forms of media?

Or is there any particular reason why the kids use that? Well, it's that generation. Z, isn't it? I mean, that's their means of communication. I mean, you know, that you don't, you know, if you're a boy who's wearing a 14, who's chatting up a girl, you don't ask her for a phone number. You ask her for her staff, you know. And that's just, that's how they communicate.

just so happens that the everyday normal communication between people who are aged 13, 14, 15 is absolutely rife with horrific images of people getting stabbed to death. You know, I mean, that's just the way is for teenagers now. You know, their main method of communication is also being used as a sort of a sort of a platform for violent. Yeah, that's fucking awful. I don't know what I do is going on. Yeah, such answer.

Yeah, we've, we have, we've contacted Snapchat and are awaiting their reply on our accusations that it sort of, the platform enables extreme youth violence and does nothing about it. And to segue into another sort of another area of reporting of yours that will segue itself into something else that's coming to the media recently is that the government just always seems to be tone deaf on this stuff and it doesn't seem to want to point the finger

in the direction of anything that would do any good. I'm thinking in terms of woke Coke in particular and the accusation level that it's trying a sort of ignite a class war, I guess, in order to justify the increase in violence and drug crime in the country. What do you make about that? Yeah, I mean, it's a flipping disgrace. I mean, it's, you know, I am a bit of a rant factor 10 on this one, but it is, it's kind of, it's a disgrace that, you know, the government knows that one of the main reasons for, you know, the rising crime in youth violence, the rising number of people addicted to drugs.

It's totally connected to austerity. And, you know, the fact that the safety net has been pulled away from a lot of the most vulnerable populations in this country over the last 10 years, you know, Cameron's, David Cameron's Conservative government started doing that from 2009 onwards. And there's been many reports. There were many reports written in 2008, 2009, saying, if you carry on doing this crime will go crazy

and they carried on doing this and crime's gone crazy but so obviously the government doesn't want to say oh shit all this youth crime these youth stabbings this rise in drug

dealing everywhere the rising number of people who want to buy drugs to going to escape their misery they don't want to say this to do with austerity and thousands of youth clubs being closed and all that. They would rather say, hey, I've got a clever idea. Let's blame drug users.

And they can't blame all drug users because they don't want to say, hey, it's the fault of Billy the builder who likes a line after coming off the construction site or whatever in the dog and duck. It's a lot more of a sort of a cultural war sort of hit that they know that a lot of the right-wing newspapers are going to love if they can go for the middle class, you know, the fabled middle-class dinner party, coax daughters. And obviously when I say fabled, you know,

it's fable because, you know, you could have maybe said that in the 1990s, but I think in 2021, trying to say that cocaine is a drug of the middle classes and dinner parties and stuff is, it's a bit silly. Well, yeah. I mean, anyone who goes down to Millwall or Charlton on a Saturday afternoon knows that it's not just a middle-class pursuit. Exactly.

I mean, was that guy snorting cocaine on the day of the England-Italy final outside Wembley pictured in the sun? I think he was the same guy with a flare stuck up his bum. But, you know, was that guy a middle-class dinner party? I don't think so. So obviously not only has the government and the police as well used this as an opportunity, you know, not only has it diverted people the public away from the real reasons why this shit is happening, it's sort of used it, it's twisted it to sort of blame drug users. And obviously it's in its interest to reduce demand because obviously the police and the government

and the Board of Police can't reduce supply. They find it very hard to reduce supply of cocaine and other drugs. So the only thing that they can try and do is sort of try and reduce the demand for it. And one of their methods of reducing their demand is to try and publicity, sort of campaigns and PR to try and say, hey, people taking drugs is really, only is it unhealthy, but it's actually you're killing people. and they are right. You know, the drug trade is not an ethical trade. You know, we've just been talking about, you know,

cannabis, farm, weed, being involved in violence. Obviously, we all know about the violence in South America and Mexico linked to the cocaine trade. So obviously, down the line, it's a very unethical trade. But what the government knows very well from its research is that English people generally don't give a shit about what happens in South America. So it was useless them trying to, they did have a joint PR campaign with the Colombian government

about 10 years ago. I can't what it was called now. Really? Project something or other. But it was basically saying to English cocaine users, don't not cocaine, because lots of people are dying in Colombia and it was all to do with the drug mules,

you know, that dog, I can't know what it was called. And, but the research showed that that just did not touch the size. No one gave a shit. So what they've done is they've used a rise in youth stabbings to say, okay, forget about Colombia or Afghanistan or whatever. This, you're killing the kids in your own neighborhood. And what they did is they tried to link powder cocaine, are middle-class drug users

with these youth killings and also with county lions as well and there is no link between these youth killings and county lines with powder cocaine with the powder cocaine trade you know these these county lines kids are not selling powder cocaine

they're selling crack and heroin to semi-homeless people they're not selling if you read the telegraph or most of the mainstream press actually or listen to a politician or or listen to Scotland Yard and Cressida Dick, you would think that County Lions kids were selling powder cocaine to posh people and you would think that the kind of kids were being 13-year-olds getting stabbed in the street, flipping selling cocaine to kind of architects in Sto, New Intern, it's just not the case.

And, I mean, it's also the case, right, that the during austerity, the police service was stripped down and the NCAA, the National Crime Agency, also put drug crime further and further down the list of priorities, right? So there's a kind of direct line between

the policing of drug offences and that, right? Is that the case? Yeah, yeah. So ever since 9-11, the policing of the drug trade, certainly in terms of, you know, the NCAA and its

preceding force. Was it Soka? I think I can't remember. But there was an absolute shift from the top, ordered from the top, to say, look, we are shifting our resources to two things now. First it was terrorism. Then it was people trafficking. And that got precedence over drug trafficking.

So you can see like, no, rising, rising. So it's falling, falling. cocaine seizures over the last 15 years in this country and that was because they just weren't looking for it anymore but still the same amount was coming

in because as the seizures were getting lower the amount of cocaine use was getting higher so that can only mean one thing which is they're not looking for it and they weren't so in terms of the borders and stuff yes that was they had almost

sort of given up the game in terms of drug trafficking. I think they've slightly turned it around slightly now because they've got, oh shit, we should try and stop drugs coming in the country. It's our job. And I think you're right, yeah, austerity is sort of reduced a number of police officers,

and some people were blaming the rise in youth crime and county lines on reduced policing. But I think that's been shown. that that's not the case. I think the last time that there was a big bump in youth crime policing wasn't a problem in 2008-9. And I also, it's the same with stop and search. And obviously, it makes complete sense.

And I sort of agree with it. You know, if you've got a massive knife crime problem, flipping, you can't just not search people or not look for knives. if you've got people, you have to, you have to do it. It's like not an option not to do it. So, so they, they, they, the police were searching, did start searching more people in 2000, from 2017 onwards, for knives, you know. And there was a lot of, obviously, people being stopped on the pretext of drugs,

but it was actually being, because the police wanted to search them for knives. And so they will see the stop and search figures, the racial disparities went up. because a lot of the youth homicides in London in particular were... USAA knows dynamic duos can save the day, like superheroes and sidekicks or auto and home insurance. With USAA, you can bundle your auto and home and save up to 10%. Tap the banner to learn more and get a quote at usa.com slash bundle. Restrictions apply.

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Book direct and save at bestwestern.com. By black kids on other black kids. So that's where police were targeting. people disproportionately because they were going after knives. But then, you know, research has found since that that wasn't really doing much. It wasn't because the knife crumb was just kept on going up and up and up. And also what a lot of young people were telling me during this research that I was doing was that, you know, okay, you might grab a few knives from doing the stop and search,

but what that does also do is it continues the terrible relationship between the Met Police and young black people in the city, which means that the Met Police are no longer really protectors for young black people in their eyes. They are almost the enemy, so they certainly don't go to them for help. And I think if you've got in their eyes a sort of a dead police force, a non-existent police force, then it's going to make you more vulnerable to a lot of things, including violence and murder. That sounds a little bit like London is turning into the wire

from what you're saying in some senses. Yeah, well, I mean, obviously, you know, America, it makes UK, whatever, you know, statistics you look at, It makes the UK look almost like zero when it comes to street killings. And obviously, police killings of young people is very, very small in the UK compared to the situation in the US. But, yeah, I mean, it's, I think, and I think it was one point a few years ago when the number of people being killed in London was higher than in New York. I remember Trump commenting on it. And obviously, so did Katie what's to us, crazy racist.

Hopkins, yes. Yeah, I mean, she was saying, you know, kind of like stab city, Londonistan. Londonistan. Black people and Asian people and Trump jumped onto that. But then obviously, you know, since then New York has in the last year, in the last year, due to lockdown, New York has really kicked off again, you know, after violent. has absolutely fallen compared to what it was in the 80s and 90s, New York, I think a surge of violence over lockdown. Because I just think purely, you know, in that city,

it can be hot in that city and people can get really annoyed with each other. And I think everyone just started killing each other because they were bored. Yeah, it's always good when you've got a glock to hand as well, when you are getting a bit pissed up with something. Yeah, there's not a shortage of them. I mean, and that's the thing is that, you know, obviously in London it's all about these youth killings is all about knives. I mean, you do to get the occasional shooting, but it's all about knives.

And we see knives, even machetes and zombie knives, they're so easy to get hold of. Anyone can get older than there's, there's, you know, like outdoor, outdoor fishing companies that are making a very pretty penny on sending these things in bulk to people who they, sort of turn a blind eye to. It's like, oh yeah, 200 knives to a council to stay in Hackney, yeah, fine. I'm sure they're going to go fishing. Can you get anything in Hackney Marshes these days?

Yeah. So yeah. I mean, it's a scandal that this is going on, that these young people are getting killed. And you think maybe more would be being done about it if they weren't black, if so many of them weren't black or mixed race. Yeah, I mean, shock horror.

You know, this violent crime affects people of colour and people of low income or in low income areas the most, which I guess brings me very tangentially onto my last question for you, which is what is cuckooing and why is it on the rice? Yeah, so cuckering sounds cute, but it's not. So that takes me back to a point I made before, which is one of the sort of modes of operation of county lines. But it is not restricted to county lines. It's what it basically is it's drug dealing crews who take over a vulnerable person's house, sometimes injecting them entirely to use that house as a drug. dealing base. But there's been some sort of quite horrific stories of this sort of this sort of method of,

you know, keeping away from the police. Because obviously when you've got a lot of young traumatised kids, two of the drug dealers, hanging out in the same quite dingy flat as a heavily traumatised sort of long-term crack and heroin user. it's got to be a recipe for disaster and exploitation, abuse. I mean, it's just awful because there's a lot of mental health issues going on there,

a lot of violence, a lot of desperation, a lot of arguments going on. So you can sort of picture the horrific situations that happen. And I know, the horrible things young people are seeing that they shouldn't be seeing in those flats terrible exploitation and sometimes

yeah and sometimes torture of long-term drug users some of whom have been murdered by people cuckering them some of whom have had find it hard to get help especially over lockdown when

they were sort of isolated even more than usual so it's kind of you know it really is a sort of weird sort of sly Dickensian sort of situation where you've got really the most vulnerable people young and old in our society sort of cohabiting in these places to kind of

one of them obviously to get paid free drugs for their use of their council flat which quickly turns into a nightmare you know their cat get stabbed and they moan about it so they get stabbed as well and you know it's yeah I mean it's a horrible situation and it happened to a friend of mine actually and it was it was really horrific to see and it's it's yeah it's just there's nothing good about it no doesn't sound like it so if people are looking around for your work max writes for vice and I believe that's where your your big story that we spoke about earlier is going to be or will have been just published

by the time where we're publishing this. Yeah, that's going out on Vice World News. So that's where I work at the moment. So I spend most of the time focusing on Europe, Middle Eastern Africa sort of area. But sometimes I do write stuff about America. I wrote a big thing the other day about PCP in America and about New York crime statistics.

So yeah, I try and sort of cover the world because my title is global drugs editor, so I might as well go for it. Yeah, fair enough. Well, when you get travelling, then you'd probably be out of sea a lot. Yeah, I can't wait. I can't wait because the furthest I've been in the last two years is Norwich.

I mean, it's brilliant. You've got to Norwich. In terms of work stuff, yeah. So I've got to try and find a really good story, sort of like maybe in the Caribbean or maybe Phaedia or something. Yeah. For our American listeners, Norwich is a very beautiful medieval

market town and a gorgeous part of Anglia and that's all I'm going to say about it. Yeah, actually I was stunned by how beautiful it was. Yeah, it's nice. It's nice up there. Yeah, I was around that way not so long ago. But anyway, Max, thanks ever so much for coming on the show.

And yeah, guys, if you want to catch Max on Twitter, his handle is Narcomania. Very brand. And yeah, we'll look forward to speak to you in the future, Max. It sounds like we've got a lot probably that we could chat to you forever about, to be honest. Yeah, nice one, Sean. Thanks for getting me on. Hi. Cheers. This is Monsters is a true crime podcast and YouTube channel where I tell the stories of the worst people on the planet. Though the stories of the victims are told, we focus on the monster who carried out the evil act. The show is split into sea,

seasons, and each season has a theme. In season one, we covered cases of philicide, which is the act of a parent killing their own child. In season two, we covered cases of people killing for love. We recently finished up season three where we covered cases of parasite, which is the act of someone killing their parents. Tune in now as we start season four, where we dive into the minds of family annihilators. sick individuals who decided to destroy their entire families. Check us out anywhere that you listen to podcasts or on YouTube by searching this is Monsters. Some follow the noise. Bloomberg follows the money. Because behind every headline is a bottom line.

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