LIFE AFTER LIFE

As a child I was afraid of the dark. The margins of my nights were always peopled with werewolves, vampires and demons. But we grow out of these things, don’t we? With adulthood comes the realisation that such intangible creatures have no basis in reality. With the advent of day they melt away like the early morning mist.

  Shortly before my nineteenth birthday I was sentenced to six years imprisonment. I was sent to Wakefield Prison in Yorkshire, a top security jail the local people call ‘The House of Horrors’. Amongst the 700 adult prisoners, there were men like beasts. Multiple murderers, serial rapists, torturers, their crimes almost defied belief. To my horror I discovered that vampires, werewolves and demons do exist.

  No, not in actual physical form. The appearance of these men never changed one iota. But when they slaughtered and mutilated humans, sometimes drinking their blood and devouring their flesh, their psychological persona was identical to that of the vampire or werewolf. Who could say that they weren’t possessed by the demon spirit? 

    It isn’t known if little Luis Alberto Garavito was afraid of the dark. However, what we do know is that he certainly had enough horror to deal with in broad daylight.  He was born, the first of seven children, to a poor family in Quindio province, Colombia on the 25th of January 1957. There is evidence that his father was a brute who regularly beat him, to such an extent that the boy would literally shake in his presence. At age 13 he was raped by a male, family friend. In view of what was to follow, one can only conclude that, although not rigidly deterministic factors in their own right, these events must have played a part in his later development.

  At age 25 he started raping young boys. They were all ‘street kids’, children of the very poor. Their ages ranged from 6 up to 15 and they were invariably good looking boys with light complexions.

  Garavito’s approach was far from haphazard. Often he would spend days befriending the boys. To aid him in this and to lower their suspicion he used a variety of props and disguises. Sometimes he would dress and pass himself off as a priest. At others he would pretend he was a teacher, a seller of lottery tickets, a vendor of religious artifacts and a tramp. Part of the subterfuge were the wigs, beards, walking sticks, plastered arms, neck braces, crutches and glasses he used. A naïve, unsuspecting child would be taken right in.

  Then he would get them to walk with him into the vast sugar cane fields that were everywhere in that region. Here he would bind their hands and rape them. Between 1982 and 1993 he raped over 300 young boys.

  Although his modus operandi always remained the same, after 1993 there was a development that was pure fiend. He still disguised himself and lured the boys in the same way. Their hands were still tied behind their backs, with the same coloured string each time. But now he would slash them with knives and burn them with lighted cigarettes. The more they fought and screamed the more he tortured them. Garavito reveled in their agony.

  He would force them to kiss him, then he would rape them. In a penultimate act of savagery he would cut their throats with such force as to virtually decapitate them. Finally he would cut off the penis and place it in the boy’s mouth.

  Garavito was so prolific that bodies were soon found all over, not only in Quindio, but also in the surrounding provinces. If the crimes themselves weren’t unique enough, he ‘hallmarked’ them further by using the same coloured string each time and he always left an empty bottle of Cacique rum at the scene. Yet no one realised that it was the work of one man. 

  To put these events into context though, Colombia is a country racked by a 35 year long civil war. Every single day there is widespread murder and destruction; every day a massacre somewhere of innocent civilians, caught up in the battle between the guerillas and the Government. In the midst of such mayhem, civilised governance has gone by the board. ‘Street kids’ as a class are not well looked after anyway. In many cases Garavito’s victims weren’t even reported missing, so many children just run away from home. Often they become an urban menace, robbing and stealing at will. In Bogota, death squads calling themselves ‘limpiadores’ or cleaners, try to solve this problem by murdering ‘street kids’ wholesale. The police are even suspected of involvement. It is a national scandal that there isn’t more of an outcry about it.

  Locally though, in Quindio Province, some of the kids were missed. Protest marches were organized, calling on the authorities to do something about the disappearances. There were headlines in local newspapers calling for an enquiry. Amongst the suspects were child prostitution rings, limpiadores, drug traffickers, paedophiles, organ traffickers and Black Magic groups. To try to calm public anger the police actually arrested and framed several tramps and drifters. However, the murders still continued.

  By all other indicators, Garavito’s life was unremarkable throughout this period. He worked as an accountant in Bogota, a handyman, then as an employee in a fast food restaurant. He was living platonically with two women, both of whom had young sons, without ever molesting the boys in any way. He was viewed as unusual by some though, being nicknamed ‘Goofy’ and ‘El Loco’.     

  By now the murders had mounted into the hundreds, but still the authorities didn’t realise that they were looking for one man. The official view was that the murders were too many and too widespread. Incompetence at the top was more than matched by incompetence at the bottom. They actually had Garavito, sometimes using false names, in custody several times before releasing him for lack of evidence. In June 1996 he was arrested under his own name at Tunja, Boyaca following the disappearance of a young boy. They released him for lack of evidence the following day. The next day they found the boy’s body, but Garavito was long gone.

  Finally, in 1997 the Colombian authorities grasped the enormity of the horror they were faced with. Literally hundreds and hundreds of young boys had gone missing, with most turning up murdered in the most horrible way. However, they still didn’t accept that they were dealing with the work of one man. After some investigation they came up with a list of ten suspects. Garavito’s name wasn’t on it! In November 1998 25 bodies were found in one month, all killed in exactly the same way.

  Invariably though, those who serve evil are subject to a quirk of fate that is instrumental in bringing about their downfall. It is almost as if nature itself cries out for justice, which then comes in the form of peculiar misfortune. In February 1999, at the scene of his latest crime, Garavito fell asleep, drunk. (he was later to claim that he was drunk during all his  crimes). As he slept, somehow he set himself alight, burning his left arm severely. In a drunken panic he ran off, leaving behind his shoes, glasses, pants, a sum of money and, of course, the usual coloured string and empty Cacique bottle. The police traced the money to where it was issued, forging a positive link to Garavito.

  At long last, in March 1999 the authorities finally acknowledged that the killings were all the work of one man and that the man was Garavito. They formed a special task force to look for him.

  Fortunately, fate intervened again. On the 22^nd of April 1999 Garavito was at the scene of his latest crime. He had lured a boy of 12 into the sugar cane fields near Villavicencio. As Garavito tortured him, the boy’s screams alerted a man who was sitting in a nearby field, smoking some of the local ‘grass’. He ran to investigate and detained Garavito after a brief struggle. 

  The police arrived just as the crowd that had gathered was about to lynch him. He was arrested under the name of Bonifacio Morera Lizcano and charged with the attempted sexual abuse of the boy. They sent details of the case to the central police authority, as they were required to do by a circular that had been issued ordering them to report all sexual attacks on young boys. They were in the process of releasing him when the special task force got to hear of the case.

  For the next six months, Garavito’s arrest was kept a closely guarded secret.  Enough mistakes had been made already and the authorities were preparing their case carefully. Then, in October 1999, Garavito was charged with multiple murder.

  For seven hours he protested his innocence. Suddenly he vomited, fell on his knees and begged God’s forgiveness. Then, in a confession eight hours long, he admitted to murdering 192 young boys in the seven years from 1993. At his lodgings, the police found newspaper cuttings concerning each murder and bus tickets placing him in the area at the time of the crime. Most importantly, they found a secret diary that Garavito had kept, recording in gruesome detail exactly what he did to each boy!

  A further, remarkable aspect of the case has been his memory. With amazing accuracy he has produced detailed drawings of the scene of each crime, leading the police to recover a total of 157 bodies. He says that his sole aim now is to reunite the grieving parents with the bodies of their children.

  Naturally enough the authorities were eager to learn what manner of man could carry out such a widespread slaughter of the innocents. On careful examination, Garavito proved to be singularly unimpressive. Barely 1.65 metres tall, he has a metal plate in his right leg which causes him to walk with a limp. His left eye is noticeably smaller than his right. Dr Oscar Diaz, the examining psychiatrist, found no trace of any recognizable mental illness and therefore declared him to be, from a psychiatric point of view, quite normal!

  Amongst his confessions, Garavito did put forward some kind of explanation for his actions. He said that, at the time of each offence, he felt himself overwhelmed by a ‘strange force’, which he found impossible to resist. He readily admitted that, should he be released, he would not be able to stop himself from doing the same things again. 

  After his confession Garavito embraced religion and he regularly prays with a priest. His sense of guilt seems to be real, for he has twice tried to kill himself.  In the absence of a death penalty in Colombia he has so far been sentenced to 1,200 years in jail, with many more cases still pending.

  This much I had learned from reading press reports about the case. As I was visiting Colombia anyway, I wanted to have alternative stories I could turn to in the event that the actual story I was working on couldn’t be done. In the present case, it was the ‘cocaine factory’ story and, not only had I done it, I had done it in just over five days. This left me with a further seven days ‘in country’ before my return flight. Rather than sit about partying with Dan I resolved to try to find out where Garavito was being held.

  It was remarkably easy. Jorge’s girlfriend, Anna Santa-Maria, was in the fortunate position of being a Government civil servant, working in a Ministry in Bogota. The ‘fortunate’ part was that, of all the other sectors of the Colombian workforce, the civil service stood the best chance of being regularly paid their wages. This gave them a social status over and above what it would have been otherwise. 

  Amongst her friends, Anna Santa-Maria numbered a presenter and Director of News at State television called Julia Navarette.  Julia was regularly to be seen reading the nightly news. She had covered the story for the network of all the young boys being murdered and of Garavito’s arrest. A quick phone call was made and I was told that we would be meeting Julia that evening for drinks.

  Julia was an attractive, dark-haired woman in her thirties, whose photogenic looks and articulateness lent themselves perfectly to her chosen profession. Unfortunately, like the overwhelming majority of Colombians, she spoke little or no English. However, she was very friendly and consummately professional. She had presented many of the reports about Garavito and his crimes and had always felt that more should have been done on the subject.

  Danny introduced me to her both as a magazine journalist and someone with contacts at the BBC. I stated that I was interested in Garavito with a view to doing a documentary for the BBC. This, in fact, wasn’t too far from the truth. For many years I had been friends with the noted Panorama journalist, Tom Mangold. We had met whilst he was doing a documentary on prisons and had corresponded and remained friends ever since. After my release I had regularly consulted with him and his colleague at the BBC, Toby, regarding various TV projects. They were always on the lookout for suitable material.

  The ‘BBC’ word was like uttering a magic incantation. In a world of rapidly deteriorating standards, they seemed to stand out as a beacon of fairness, accuracy and professionalism. Without ever having to prove a connection in any way, or even having to show my NUJ card, it opened doors that otherwise would have remained firmly closed.

  We spent a delightful evening with Julia and members of her extended family at a restaurant in the suburbs of Bogota. Seated around several tables in the cooler evening air, both the company and the food was extremely good. The subject of Garavito seemed to fascinate and repulse the average Colombian in equal measure. They were only too well aware that, as a country, they held the dubious distinction of coming first on all the major crime and violence indicators. They took no pride whatsoever in the fact that now they had the world’s worst serial killer.

  Julia knew more about the subject than most. She had covered the growing outcry over the disappearances, then the manhunt and, finally, the arrest and trial. This had added to her already impressive list of contacts amongst Colombia’s police and judiciary. As we parted she announced that she had arranged a meeting for Danny and myself in the morning with the National Director of the Fiscalia.

  I was immediately both impressed and concerned. If I hadn’t already known then Danny would have soon told me, the Fiscalia was the premier law enforcement agency in Colombia. It was a cross between the American FBI and our own Crown Prosecution Service, with an emphasis on the former. All the rest of Colombia’s law enforcement might be something of a Mickey Mouse operation, but not the Fiscalia. Rumour had it that they had been trained by the CIA.

  As one can imagine, I wasn’t only concerned about my journalistic antecedents, or rather, the lack of them. There was always the small matter of my extremely serious criminal antecedents. These would certainly be held by Interpol and thus be only the click of a computer button away. Even with the most cursory of checks the game would be up. It might not be enough to get me deported, but it would attract a lot of attention to me. I still had to get back to the UK with all the crucial photos for my ‘cocaine kitchen’ story. I didn’t want to jeopardise that in any way.

  Danny thought that it was all hugely amusing, just another interesting episode in that spaced out reality that passed for his daily life. I did manage to force one major concession out of him though. For the duration of our visit to the Fiscalia, he would leave his little tin and its powdery, white contents at home!   

  Noon the following day saw Danny, Julia and myself seated around a table in the fortress-like building that housed Bogota’s Fiscalia. As someone with vast experience of top security set-ups I was duly impressed. The high, concrete walls with state-of-the-art electronic surveillance paraphernalia draped everywhere, spoke of an organization that was very much 21^st Century. My passport sufficed to get me through all the identity checks and screenings. Secretly I prayed that it would be enough to get me out again. 

  Pablo Elias Gonzalez was the National Director of the entire Colombian Fiscalia. With him was his Head of Press, Alexandra Buitrago, and the forensic scientist who had investigated every scene of crime in the Garavito case. Dr Helga Quevedo. It could hardly have been a more high-powered meeting. I truly was flying by the seat of my pants.

  Danny was introduced as our interpreter and it was certainly the universal lack of English that saved me. All questions were routed through him and any that could have been even slightly compromising were duly ignored and put down to having been lost in translation. Anyway, the Colombian tradition of politeness and good manners prevailed throughout. I further noticed that there was a healthy degree of openness in the way they conducted their business of governance, an object lesson to our own secrecy-obsessed Home Office.   

  There was another factor, of course, that of politics. It seemed that the National Directorship was an elected post and that Senor Gonzalez was soon to stand for election again. Cleary, he felt that a prestigious documentary by the BBC, featuring himself prominently, would do his chances no harm whatsoever. However, there was also a genuine belief that this was an important case, with strong implications for other cases of its ilk, and that not enough had been done on it. 

  An animated discussion followed. They showed me a computerized file comprising their entire records on the Garavito case and printed me off a copy! They also gave me an ‘in house’ video showing, amongst other things, scenes of crimes, Garavito in custody, mutilated bodies and arresting officers. Most importantly, Dr Queveco was due to visit Garavito at the prison where he was being held at Villavincencio in two days time. Arrangements were being made for us to visit Garavito with her.

  An amazing relationship had sprung up between Garavito and Helga, a shy girl barely out of her teens. Since his confession, Garavito had turned his back on the world, refusing to meet with anyone but Helga and the priest. He was especially incensed by Colombian journalists, who had referred to him as a monster. Helga regularly visited to try to determine the location of further bodies. Garavito would hug her to him and cry. It was Helga who would ask Garavito to see us and to take part in the documentary.

  Early Thursday morning, Danny, Julia and myself set out on the three-hour drive to Viilavicencio. Helga was going by plane. As with any road outside Bogota, we could expect to be stopped not only by police and Army checkpoints, but also by guerilla ones. The latter eventuality would mean certain death for Helga. The guerillas always shoot members of the Fiscalia on sight. 

  We descended from the chilly heights of Bogota, through stunningly beautiful mountain gorges, to the tropical plains on which Villavicencio lay. Everywhere a confusion of greenery thrust itself skywards in an explosion of fecundity. In a country so blighted by human death it was as if nature itself was showing that it had the power to regenerate.

  Villavicencio was hot. As long as the car was moving, cool air poured in through the windows. But as soon as we stopped, however fleetingly, sweat would spring wherever cloth met flesh. We quickly found the local Fiscalia building and were instantly grateful for its efficient air-conditioning.

  The local Director, Carlos Arturo Torres, had obviously been briefed by his National Director. He assured us that we were to be afforded every assistance. He informed us that Helga was arriving shortly and that we were all expected at the prison at 2pm.

  Shortly after, Helga arrived with the local Chief of Detectives. He was a short, stocky, tough-looking guy in his late thirties who had obviously been around. He had that naturally suspicious nature that, no doubt, makes for a good detective, coupled with something of a sixth sense. He picked up on me immediately. A couple of times I caught him looking at me thoughtfully whilst I was talking to someone else. Mentally I made a note to be careful around this guy, lest I raise his suspicions further........

All was forgiven though when, barely half an hour later, Edgar showed up with another guy with a jeep. Just outside San Pablo our big, red Totota jeep was stopped at a heavily-fortified Army checkpoint. Whatever Edgar said to the soldiers it was enough to get us through. Further on, special Government anti-guerilla troops waved us to the side of the road and Edgar talked us through again. A glaring irony that wasn’t lost on me was that this was the same road that 600 Paramilitaries, the death squads, had traveled up just a few hours earlier. So much for the fiction that the regular army doesn’t collude and cooperate with them, I thought.

  We passed a burnt-out command post that had belonged to FARC. The driver told us that ten guerillas had died here only last week. From here on, a road that had been merely impassable to cars became a four-wheel-drive obstacle course. The good news was that, where the Paramilitaries had turned off, our route carried straight on. We forded five rivers and drove around and over fallen trees, deep ruts and boulders. Agua Sucio just wasn’t worth it. Fortunately, this miserable collection of huts was just another stop on the journey. We topped up with cool, soft drinks and were soon on our way again. Finally, we breasted the brow of a steep hill and stopped. Our bone-shaking ride had lasted over three hours. 

  The present stop was for Edgar to take a pee. Just before disappearing into the undergrowth he pointed out to me the farm buildings nestling in the lee of the hill below. The sweep of his hand took in the thousands of coca plants that covered the surrounding hills. Amongst them he pointed out the ‘raspachinos’ or pickers, working in the blazing sun.

  He cautioned me about taking photos, saying that good manners demanded that we ask his permission first. Well I’m afraid that, by this stage, I was clean out of ‘good manners’ and something called ‘enlightened self interest’ was firmly in their place. I hadn’t come all this way, risking life and limb, for some farmer to say I couldn’t take any photos. I could take the best story in the world back to ‘Front’, but in the absence of photos it would be as nothing. 

  I too walked off into the undergrowth, making as if I were going for a pee. As I gazed through the lens of my thoroughly ordinary camera, I wondered what all the fuss was about. The collection of scruffy sheds in the distance could have been anything, anywhere in the world. If it really was a coke farm, then it certainly didn’t look it from where I was standing. 

  As it turned out, the farmer was hospitality personified. He was at pains to emphasise that he was only a poor man and the obvious poverty on his farm attested to that. When asked why he grew coca, he pointed at his six children. He said that there weren’t any alternatives for him. If he grew the food plant, Yucca, it would be too expensive to sell by the time he got it to market, because of the distance and the cost of transport.

  Certainly, the economics of cocaine production at this end of the market weren’t impressive. Coca was a hardy plant that would grow virtually anywhere. However, it still had to be fumigated by hand two to three times before each of the three harvests each year, to protect it from insects and worms. He usually employed 30 ‘raspachinos’, working 11 hour days, six days a week. For this each was paid around £8 per day, with free board and lodging.  

  The gasoline and cement to produce the coca base had to be brought in by boat and this was subject to taxing on the way. He paid a flat tax of about £18 per hectare to the Paramilitaries who controlled the area and a further £60 per kilo tax on each kilo of coca base produced. Finally, he would have to sell the base to the Paramilitaries for about £600 per kilo. These were the same Paramilitaries who operated out of San Pablo under the protection of the Army!

  The farmer said that we could photograph what we liked, as long as we didn’t photograph him or the faces of his workers. That could bring the wrath of the Paramilitaries down on them. He absolutely refused all offers of payment. I was already deeply impressed by the simple Colombian courteousness and hospitality I had experienced.

  Before we embarked on the guided tour though, there was one final ritual to be observed. Taking a boiling pot off a nearby stove containing coca leaves, the farmer poured each of us a cup of coca tea. He said that it was good for everything, including illnesses and allergies, and would give us energy.

  It wasn’t for me though. I had long ago promised myself that coke wouldn’t have me in any way, shape or form. Further, abstinence had become almost an article of faith for me on this trip. I felt that, if I lived clean, then I might just get the story. And as for the extra energy, on most days I tripped on my own adrenalin anyway.    

  With two ‘raspachinos’ as extra guides, we climbed the slopes covered with coca bushes and the two different types were pointed out to us. Both types of leaf looked identical to me, apart from the fact that the Peruvian coca leaf was much darker than the Colombian one. We were told that it also yielded four crops a year against three for the Colombian.

  The actual ‘cocina’ was on the summit of a small hill. Basically, it was a long shed with no walls, just six upright beams to hold the roof up. Inside, two large, black, plastic sheets were spread out on the rough earth floor. On the first, a worker was chopping a vast pile of leaves into small pieces with a garden strimmer. On the second sheet, the chopped leaf was covered with cement powder, sprinkled with gasoline, then trod in by men wearing Wellington boots. Once it was well mixed in it was shoveled into large black plastic drums, which were topped up with gasoline and left for two hours.

  The next stage involved letting the liquid drain out of each drum into another drum  below. Permanganate was added and stirred well in. The mixture was then left to stand for another two hours, when the coca paste could be seen in the form of a white, viscous precipitation at the bottom of each drum. The farmer told us that his ‘cocina’ turned out approximately 15 kilos of base a week.

  All through the guided tour, Danny, Jorge and myself had been photographing everything that was remotely interesting. I was sure that we had several hundred photos between us. Together with the farmer’s description, I had what I had come for. The worry that exercised me now was that, as everyday Colombian life was so problematic, would I get back safely with the photos? Edgar emphasized that nobody had ever photographed a working ‘cocina’ before.

  I wanted to leave immediately, but the farmer asked us to join him for lunch In the circumstances it would have been churlish to refuse. I ate with a tranquility belied by my internal mood. I consoled myself with the thought that the trip back couldn’t be nearly so fraught as the trip out.

  The ride back to San Pablo was without incident. The Army roadblock had gone and there was no sign of the Paramilitaries either. I paid the driver off, musing that too many trips like today’s  would see his new jeep a wreck in no time. 

  Back at the hotel, the first priority was a cool shower and a change into clean clothes. I took the rolls of film with me everywhere. Afterwards, I went to reception to get a cold drink from the fridge. Four young guys were by the reception desk. They gave me a hard stare as I came in. It was one of them ‘who are you looking at’ stares that were so commonplace in London. Back there I would probably have responded in kind, but, quite strangely, because personal interaction was so polite and unthreatening in Colombia, I had relaxed considerably. However, it registered subliminally as I returned to my room.

  Within minutes raised voices could be heard coming from reception. As I came out of my room, Danny was already in the hall. We hurried towards the reception area. The four young guys had Jorge and Edgar backed up against a wall. Both were white as sheets and literally shaking with fear. “They’re taking us away”, cried Edgar to Danny, “please help us.”

  It was in situations like this that Danny was worth his weight in gold. He quickly engaged the four guys in conversation and soon had them laughing. Within seconds all the threat went out of the situation. It transpired that they were Paramilitaries and they had heard that we were in town and wanted to know what we were doing here. They had thought that we were Americans. 

  Danny explained that we were English and made some deprecating remarks about Yanks that had them laughing again. He told them of our mission to photograph the ‘cocina’. They left, still laughing and seemingly satisfied. 

  Jorge and Edgar though were definitely not laughing. Still shaking, Edgar said that they were definitely on the verge of being taken away and killed. He emphasised that we must get out of town right away. “We must leave right now or we’re dead”, were his exact words.

  It wasn’t exactly panic, but we had our bags packed and were in reception paying our bill in no time at all. The owner was relieved to see the back of us. He had been following developments from inside his office and was as white as either Edgar or Jorge. 

  At a trot, we made our way down to the river and accepted the first boat available without bothering to negotiate the price. Soon we were heading upstream towards Barranca. If I had thought that we were now safe, Edgar soon disabused me of that notion. “They will phone ahead to their comrades, we must get out of Barranca as soon as possible”, added a still shaken Edgar. Ever mindful of the 700 dead and 1,000 missing  last year alone, I could only agree with him.  

  We docked at Barranca and Edgar spent a couple of minutes finding a properly registered taxi. We paid him the £80 he wanted to take us to Bucaramanga. Three hours later we were in the Melia Confort Hotel, five star, safe and secure.

  After the almost constant excitement in Colombia, England was something of an anti-climax. My reunion with Marsha wasn’t nearly as fraught as I might have expected, despite several missed phone calls. I figured that, whatever else she might do, she wasn’t about to cut my head off and stick it on a pole. However, I did refrain from planting the idea in her head.

  My arrival at ‘Front’s’ offices had all the sense of occasion of a returning hero. Eoin must have been considerably relieved. This had been a comparatively expensive assignment and he had gone out on a limb to okay it. But when he saw the photos and listened to the story he was delighted. 

  The following month’s issue saw my ‘cocina’ story prominently displayed inside, over several pages. The ‘piece de resistance’, of course, was the photo of me in a ‘Front’ t-shirt holding several kilos of coke in my arms. Eoin told me later that that particular issue had increased the month’s circulation by 80,000.

  Even the BBC showed an interest. They put an account of the trip, together with several photos, on their news website, where it remains to this day under ‘Colombian cocaine factory’.

  I was now quite a ‘hot’ magazine journalist and, although it wasn’t the situation that every door was open to me, I could at least consider writing for more prestigious media outlets. Not that I was ungrateful to ‘Front’, but, quite obviously, I didn’t want to spend the rest of my career writing exclusively for them. The problem with a triumph though, was that it always raised the question of what to do for an encore. I already had my next story though and, in fact, I had already done it.

The five of us advanced slowly up the narrow earth road, stepping around household articles that had been pulled from the huts and left. The inside of every hut had been ransacked and unwanted items smashed. Here and there fires had been started, evidenced by the blackened timbers and piles of ash. Other huts had had their corrugated tin roofs pulled off. Two dozen or more chickens foraged amongst the ruins. Still there was no one to be seen. 

  Not one word had been exchanged between us since we had landed. Treading carefully to avoid making too much noise, we were listening intently for signs of life. Although we all must have been aware that we were entering a potentially dangerous situation here, it was as if we were being drawn inexorably onwards by our desire to find out what had happened.

  For myself, I saw an opportunity to save a failing assignment. In the absence of a cocaine story, photographic evidence to reveal this latest massacre to the world would suffice. That was why it was worth taking a risk for. Mentally I steeled myself against the discovery of tortured corpses and severed heads on poles.

  At its end, the narrow dirt road broadened out into large, roughly rectangular open space that must have served as the village square. In the middle was a wooden hut with the remains of telephone wires running to it. The window openings were all blackened with smoke and the roof had collapsed. Wordlessly I wished ‘goodbye’ to my phone call to Marsha.

  On the side of another hut was some more painted writing. Once again the letters AUC stood out clearly. Danny translated. “It’s a warning. It says, “This is what happens to the enemies of the AUC.” He looked directly at me. “We better get out of here, Norm, just in case they’re still around. These aren’t people to fuck about with. They’ll kill you as soon as look at you.”

  It was enough to bring all of us to our senses. It was almost as if I had been dream-walking through the village. The full implications of what could happen should we bump into this group finally hit home. Without actually breaking into a run, we hurried back to the boat.

  Just as we were pushing off from the bank, an old man emerged from the trees. Edgar got out and went over to speak with him. The conversation was brief and he came rushing back, motioning for the boatman to push off as he climbed in. “The Paramilitaries were here just over a week ago”, he gushed. “They killed ten villagers and the rest have fled. There’s only this old man now. He’s lived here all his life. He says he’s sad and lonely.”

  The old man stood in the trees, watching us as we disappeared up the river. I stared for a long time at the forlorn figure, musing that this was the real face of Colombia’s civil war. A civilian population at the mercy of right wing death squads, in league with the Colombian army and indirectly supported by the US.

  The river narrowed again and under overarching trees perhaps fifty feet ahead was a jungle-fatigued guerilla in an out-board-powered canoe He immediately set off with us in pursuit. At times it was almost like a chase, as we twisted and turned around sharp bends.

  Until now, all the journey had been in the gloom of small rivers overhung by a canopy of trees that served to keep most of the light out. Suddenly the river opened out into a large and most beautiful lagoon. Golden sunlight danced on impossibly blue waters, as countless thousands of multi-coloured, exotic birds swooped and called. It was breathtaking.

  We crossed the lagoon and docked near the small group of huts that was San Lorenzo. The four ELN guerillas we had met the day before were sitting amongst the trees with several of their colleagues. We pressed them on their offer to show us a ‘cocina’ and they said they would have to ask their commanders further up the river.

  A ten-minute canoe ride took us to ‘The Point’, a fortified bend in the river that served as an ELN command post. We were introduced to Comandante Julian and Comandante Aguado, the two most senior ELN commanders in the area. Both were friendly and helpful, but, in practical terms, there was little they could do personally to show us a ‘cocina’. However, they did say they would make some enquiries. Quite bizarrely, I then found myself discussing the finer points of Marxist ideology with them, whilst we awaited an answer. 

  All the while I was watching the coming and going of the boats on the river. Many had the tell-tale cargoes of gasoline and cement. All were stopped by the ELN and all were taxed. Noting my interest, Comandante Julian suddenly asserted that the ELN were not involved in the cocaine trade. They only taxed the cattle and gold trades. Bearing in mind I had seen only timber structures since I’d been in the jungle, I forebore to ask what all the cement was being used for then.

  I snoozed for a while in the shade of a large tree and awoke to find Danny exercising a previously unknown talent as a film director. Having decided that the guerillas weren’t actually doing a lot just sitting about in the shade, Dan had decided to get them on manouvres for a photo shoot. He had several in a slit trench pointing guns aggressively and several more were in an attacking formation down by the jetty confronting half a dozen more who were bursting out of some bushes. Meanwhile, he and Jorge were snapping away like crazy with their little cameras with both Comandantes Julian and Aguado looking on benignly.  

  Our answer, when it came over a badly crackling radio link, wasn’t helpful. ELN in that area couldn’t help us find a ‘cocina’, but they would send us upriver to a FARC post where there was a commander who could.

  Once again we headed upriver in the canoe. A 90-minute trip took us to Yanque, another collection of huts, but this time set atop a steep hill. The most welcoming aspect for us was the Coca Cola sign. We sat in the village café, greedily guzzling exquisitely cold soft drinks.

  By all accounts, Comandante Yasid was the most senior FARC commander we had so far met. He was a young, intense, yet friendly guy, whose fledgling beard and moustache only served to emphasize his youth. He was introduced as the commander of the whole 24^th Front. As Egdar waved his hand expansively to indicate the extent of Yasid’s kingdom I could only muse that never had one so young been in total charge of so many trees. 

  For a country that was at the forefront of cocaine production it seemed amazing that, despite traveling across hundreds of miles, we had never been near nor by a ‘cocina’. And that was exactly the situation now. Yasid said that there wasn’t one in the area, but he knew of one near a village called ‘Agua Sucio’.

 However, there were a number of problems. The direct route was by water to a large town called San Pablo and we could get a jeep from there. San Pablo though, was a Paramilitary stronghold and anyone arriving from FARC-held territory was liable to be shot on sight. I had been following the conversation carefully through Danny’s translation and as we got to the stage of Yasid telling us the alternative, I followed his pointing arm indicating a massive, green-swathed mountain in the middle-distance. Danny was suddenly uncharacteristically tight-lipped. 

  “Go on then, Dan. What’s the alternative”, I urged.

  “Yasid said that it’s a five hour trip by mule over that mountain”, he pronounced grimly.

  By now it was all becoming thoroughly ridiculous. I had expected some unusual situations, but a close encounter with a mule hadn’t been amongst my expectations.

  “And we’re not used to riding mules”, added Dan, stating the obvious. “An hour’s ride will cripple us.”

  “I’ve got too much respect for my bollocks to spend five hours on a fucking mule”, I exploded. We’re going to San Pablo by boat.”

  The boatman thought otherwise though. It was only the obscene sum of £100, a small fortune by local standards, that managed to change his mind. I didn’t much care for the way he crossed himself as we set off, but at least we were going by the direct route now. 

  We arrived at San Pablo just as night was falling. The four of us booked into a small, scruffy hotel, then went in search of supper. Of all the places I had been so far, there was definitely a different ‘feel’ about this place. People looked at us furtively and there was an air of fear. It didn’t help our collective paranoia when we noticed a guy on a motorbike who was following us everywhere. We ate quickly in a restaurant then retired to our rooms for the night..

  Breakfast brought another drama. The guy with the jeep, who Edgar had hired to take us beyond Agua Sucio, had backed out. At daybreak, 600 Paramilitaries had driven up the very road we were due to travel on to attack ELN positions in the biggest operation in years. The whole area had suddenly become even more dangerous than usual, ergo, no jeep driver.

  Seeing the expression on my face and having already felt the force of my anger on several occasions now, Edgar was apologetic. “I did warn you before we started that, in Colombia, nothing remains the same; everything changes.” And to give credit where it is due, he had warned me. He had also warned me about something called ‘Locombia’, a corruption of ‘loco’, the Spanish word for ‘mad’ and, of course, Colombia. The word itself meant a particularly crazy Colombian state of mind that ran through all things. This latest situation was classic ‘locombia’.

  I had instructed both Jorge and Danny to take lots of photos of anything of interest. The three of us sat with cameras at the ready. That was when I discovered that, as stimulating as I had first thought the boat ride to be, there was very little of interest to see. For a start, there were no roads, no bridges, no buildings of any kind, no telegraph poles, no animals and no people. And as both banks were lined by tall reeds, all you could see in every direction was a brown-green wall that served to obscure everything else.

  I was soon bored. The few birds we might have seen were frightened off by the roar of the outboard, which, as the river narrowed, seemed deafening. Then there was the percussive drumbeat of the bottom of the boat striking the water as it skimmed across the waves. This was aggravated by the boatman criss-crossing the river to avoid the shallows. Resist it as I might, whatever position I adopted it still sent shockwaves all the way up my spine. Now I could appreciate the value of the muscle-relaxants. My romantic conception of river travel was rapidly undergoing a marked transformation. Already I longed for the boat-ride to be over. 

  But, as Edgar was quick to inform us, we had just over four hours of this before we got to our destination. This was another thing I was discovering about Edgar. Although, at first sight, he didn’t seem to be a morbid chap, he was an absolute fund of disturbing information. All conversations had to be conducted at a shout, to be heard over the roar of the outboard, so there was no ignoring what he was saying. Either he was bored too and was talking to pass the time, or he saw it as part of his duty as tour guide. However, he told us in quick succession that, the river was teeming with piranha, some of them so  large they could bite your hand off; there were also lots of alligators and crocodiles, some of which could grow to 20 feet or more and, there was the ever-present danger of colliding with sunken logs as we sped along the river. I briefly contemplated the prospect of some scaly, armoured behemoth pulling me from the canoe, as his smaller brethren, all snapping teeth and flailing fins, tore chunks of flesh from my bones. I resolved that the first Spanish phrase I must learn would be, “For fuck’s sake shut up, Egdar.”

  Half an hour into the journey the river suddenly widened again and there, on the bank about 200 yards away, was some kind of military checkpoint. Two soldiers wearing Army fatigues, crouched over a heavy machine gun. “Don’t let the soldiers see the cameras”, shouted Edgar, in a determined attempt at a whisper. “If they think we’re journalists they might turn us back or confiscate the cameras.”

  You would have thought that, with so little else to occupy them, the soldiers would have taken the opportunity to at least search the boat and question us about where we were going. For, if Europeans were scarce in the jungle towns of Colombia, you could bet your life they were virtually non-existent on the rivers. But not at all. Without even standing up they glanced down into the boat, checking, I guess, that we weren’t carrying weapons. Then they waved us on.

  On the bank, perhaps 50 yards past the check-point, was the wreckage of a crashed plane. It was a small, two-seater job that looked relatively intact, except for the tail-section, that had broken off and was lying separate from the rest. Edgar said that it was probably a narco-traffickers plane that had been forced down. Soldiers or no soldiers, I just couldn’t resist the opportunity to photograph the first interesting thing we had so far come across. Shielding the camera with my body, I took several surreptitious snaps of the downed plane.

  The next three and a half hours seemed to pass exceedingly slowly. Occasionally a straw hut would break the unchanging backdrop of the wall of vegetation. From time to time a native fisherman would stare at us as we sped by. The monotony of the unchanging surroundings, the roar of the engine, the buffeting from the boat, the heat and the mosquitoes all combined to make an experience that was little better than purgatory. The only moments of interest were when the river narrowed to such an extent and the shallows became so difficult to pass that the boatman and his assistant both got out of the boat and, waist deep in the opaque water, guided us through by hand. My thoughts firmly with the crocs and the pirhanas, I wondered out loud if the time would come when we too would have to do the same. I took little comfort from the fact that Edgar didn’t see fit to reply.     

  It was during one of these periods, when the boatmen were out of the boat and the outboard noise was just below the pain barrier, that Edgar decided to share one of his gems with us. He remarked that he had been kidnapped a total of five times by the various armed groups. Discussing it later, Dan and I were of the considered opinion that he had left it rather late to tell us and, seeing as he had left it so very late, why did he bother to tell us at all?

  Eventually the river widened out again and a there before us was El Baigre, our destination. You could barely call it a village, just a collection of wood and straw huts clustered along the river bank. As Edgar had explained to us, it was a point controlled by FARC. It was one of them who would direct us to the ‘cocina’ or coke kitchen. They didn’t call them farms or factories. 

  We made our way up the bank and Edgar introduced us to Comandante Alphonso, who was the senior FARC guerilla in charge. Alphonso was a very laid back black guy. He said he would phone HQ and find out what had been arranged for us. Still in a very laid back manner, he cautioned us that if we were spies we would be shot.

  Minutes later he told us that a FARC boat was on its way to take us on the next leg of the journey, as there were no ‘cocinas’ in the immediate area. I settled down in the shade to wait, all the while observing daily life in El Baigre.

  The sun was exceedingly hot and the humidity made breathing difficult at times. So all activities were conducted at a very leisurely pace. There were about 30 villagers in all and amongst them I saw two more guerillas patrolling slowly between the huts. Alphonso told us that the Paramilitaries had attacked El Baigre two weeks previously. A FARC guerilla had been killed and ten villagers massacred, whilst the Paramilitaries had lost ten of their own. It seemed hard to believe in a place that looked so idyllic.

 From time to time, boats stopped at the bottom of the bank. One of the guerillas would walk down and check the cargo, money would exchange hands and then the boat would be on its way again. Mostly they were carrying clearly visible drums of gasoline and bags of cement. Other cargoes were hidden under covers. Edgar explained that it was all connected with the coke trade. The gasoline and cement were used in the production process and the hidden cargoes were the finished product. All cargoes were taxed by FARC before being allowed to go on their way.

  Occasionally other people arrived and came to sit around a hut that served drinks and snacks. Their city-smart shirts and slacks made them stand out quite clearly from the villagers. Danny was quite an authority on the coke trade himself. He pointed out two well-dressed, serious-looking guys sitting together by the snacks hut. “They’re both from Cali”, he said. He pointed at two other, similar guys sitting a short distance away, “And they’re from Medellin. That’s something you wouldn’t have seen a couple of years ago. They’d have killed each other on sight. But the big cartels have been broken up and there are hundreds of smaller cartels and people have learned to cooperate.”

  Dan went on to explain that these guys were here to buy the coca base produced in the ‘cocinas’. They would pay about £600 a kilo for it. Back in their home cities they would process the base into its crystalline form and its price would increase to about £1,200 a kilo. Quite amazingly though, they wouldn’t take so much as one gram back with them. The actual bags of coke they bought and paid for at El Baigre would be exactly the same ones delivered to them by FARC in their home cities!

  All of a sudden the soporific effect of the heat was causing my eyelids to droop and I felt an irresistible urge to sleep. I found an empty hut that must have been used as a store and fell asleep immediately. When I awoke a couple of hours later, Danny was standing outside, “’Ere come and have a look at this, Norm”, he urged. “See what you’ve been sleeping next to.”

  I stumbled outside, blinking in the bright sunlight. The hut I had been sleeping in was divided in half by a wall. Danny was pointing to the inside of this other half. Stacked against the wall was about three dozen clear polythene bags containing large, off-white granules “You’ve been sleeping right next to 40 kilos of coca base, Norm.”

  If nothing else, it was an excellent photo opportunity. I fetched a clean ‘Front’ t-shirt from my bag and put it on. It was a black t-shirt, with ‘Front’ printed on the front of it in big yellow letters. Then, holding several kilo bags of coke in my arms, but with the word ‘Front’ clearly visible, I got Danny to take a dozen or so photos. I guessed that these photos alone would be worth the trip to the boys back at the magazine.

  For a while I sat watching some women of the village washing clothes in the river down by the bank where we had landed. Due to the heat I had been going through clean socks at an alarming rate. It caused some amusement amongst the women when I joined them to wash some socks out in the river water. I reasoned that, in the heat, they would be dried out before we went on our way. 

  Ever mindful of Edgar’s crocs, alligators and piranha, I was paying more attention to what was going on in the nearby waters than I was to the actual washing of the socks. I only relaxed as I was hanging them on a line stretched between two huts. Suddenly there was a loud explosion. I cringed and ducked with everyone else. All eyes turned to focus on a young, city-dressed guy standing next to a group of playing children. A pistol was lying on the ground between his feet. Clearly, it had dropped from his belt and accidentally gone off. I watched as the nearest guerilla walked across and roundly chastised him.

  Almost immediately there was a flurry of activity down by the river bank. A canoe pulled up carrying four heavily armed guerillas in jungle fatigues. They trudged up the bank, the bright sunlight glancing off the machine guns and bandoleros of bullets they were carrying.

  Two things surprised me. Firstly, they were ELN guerillas. ELN were supposed to be fighting with FARC at our original destination, yet here they were comrades and friends. Secondly they were all so very young. They were also very friendly. Edgar did the introductions. Ernesto, their leader, was still only 20 and had been training to become a doctor before he had joined the guerillas. I asked him, through Danny, why he had joined. “When you see the Paramilitaries come to your town and massacre people, you know it could be your turn next. It is only common sense to fight”, he said with passion.

  Although friendly too, Elena said little. She was barely seventeen and clearly quite shy, but there was something more. It was as if she had retreated from the world. When we got Ernesto on his own he told us that her whole family had been massacred by the ‘death squads’. That was why she had joined ELN. He added that she was a fearless fighter and offered the opinion that it was very sad, because it seemed that she was searching for death.    

  By now Danny, in his own inimitable way, was on excellent terms with all of them. He had Ernesto laughing heartily and even Elena was smiling. Next thing, he had their M16s and Kalashnikovs off them and he and I were holding them over our ‘Front’ t-shirts for another set of photos. When they asked what we were doing here, Danny told them about our mission to find a ‘cocina’. Ernesto said that if we couldn’t do it through FARC, we should come to their base at a nearby lagoon in the morning and they would try to help us. I got Danny to take full details of exactly how to get there. I wanted to give myself other options, because I was becoming worried now by the lack of results at our current location.

  It was as they were leaving that I suddenly realized that the boatman who had brought us to El Baigre was nowhere to be seen, neither was his boat. Edgar said that I shouldn’t worry, because his job was only to bring us here. River travel was the only way to get about here and it would be the easiest thing in the world to get another boatman to take us where we wanted to go. 

  Then the senior FARC Comandante everyone was waiting for arrived. He was a serious-looking, no nonsense sort of guy in his forties, wearing the regulation jungle fatigue and the equally regulation heavy, black moustache. He moved about with an air of authority, as if he was used to being obeyed. The pace of the three local FARC guys quickened visibly, as they hurried about to his barked orders.

  Even with Edgar’s influence, the best we could achieve was a place at the back of the queue behind the guys from Cali and Medellin. Quite clearly, the important business of the day was coke business. I watched as local growers and vendors brought their bags of coca base out for the inspection of the city guys. Quality was discussed and price negotiated. Money was handed over and delivery details given for where the coke should be delivered to. All the while, the senior FARC Comandante supervised proceedings.

  With our turn came our latest and biggest disappointment. We found out that the only reason the Comandante had come to El Baigre was to do the coke business. He said that there were too many things going on in the area for him or FARC to accommodate our wish to see a ‘cocina’. And he said it in a manner that brooked no argument. Almost before we knew it, he was back in his canoe and speeding away up the river.

  So what did I do now? I looked at Edgar enquiringly and his gaze could hardly hold mine. The reality was that I was deep in the Colombian jungle and I was no closer to finding a ‘cocina’. Edgar suggested that we go to see Ernesto at the ELN base in the morning. “What’s the matter with now?”, I demanded aggressively, the prospect of failure looming like a spectre before my eyes.

  “It’s almost 6pm and FARC shut the river at six”, said Edgar sheepishly.

  “What?”, I barked.

  “It’s a curfew, Norm”, added Danny. “After 6pm nothing moves on the river and anything that does gets shot at by FARC.”

  Well that was straightforward enough. Whatever our next moves were going to be, the sure thing was that we were going to spend the night at El Baigre.

  There was no such thing as a hotel, of course, just a wooden hut partitioned off into absolutely basic rooms. Luckily for us there was one room left. Unluckily for Jorge and Edgar it only had two beds. To be honest I would have tossed a coin to see who slept where, but Edgar, overcome with guilt no doubt, volunteered to sleep in the cane chairs near the café. At the same time he volunteered for Jorge too.

  When I saw the room I realized that he hadn’t made much of a sacrifice. I don’t know what impressed me the least, the two hammocks slung between the rough wood walls, the open gaps for windows or the bare earth floor. Before leaving us for the night, Edgar just couldn’t resist imparting one last gem of wisdom. “Make sure you sleep with your shoes in the hammock with you, under the mosquito netting”, he called out. “Otherwise poisonous scorpions, snakes and spiders could get in them in the night and sting you when you go to put them on in the morning.”

  I knew I was going to have difficulty falling asleep. I was roasting in the heat, suffocating in the humidity and my right arm was on fire from a dozen mosquito bites. Now, as I swung perilously in the unstable hammock, a sweaty trainer nestling snugly under each arm, all I could think of was the big, bristly tarantula, poised at this very second to launch itself upwards and bite my unprotected bum through the hammock canvas. I briefly toyed with the idea of waking Dan up and asking him how high the Colombian spiders could jump, but I knew he wouldn’t thank me for it.

  I must have laid there for a couple of hours, listening to the sounds of the jungle. The myriad rustlings, chirpings, buzzings, hissings, slitherings, croakings, hummings, screechings, growlings and Danny’s snoring acted as a backdrop to the sudden sharp death cries, as nature’s creatures fell upon each other in an orgy of mass slaughter.

  Just as I was finally dropping off from sheer exhaustion, there was a piercing shriek ending in a throaty gurgling, that brought me fully awake and nearly pitched me out of the hammock  I heard Dan stir and I called out in a breathy whisper, “Dan, what the fuck was that?”

  There was silence for a couple of seconds, over which I could hear the continuing gurgling. “Sounds like someone slaughtered a pig”, said Dan and, with a grunt, turned over and fell asleep again. I lay there wondering what sort of idiot slaughtered a pig in the middle of the night.

  I wasn’t in the best of moods in the morning. I had just spent the most uncomfortable night of my life and I had awoken to find that toilet arrangements were basic in the extreme. Residents took turns to fill a bucket from a large vat of river water, then wash in the bucket. I improvised slightly by filling several bucket with the relatively cool water and tipping them over my head. Bliss, utter bliss. But only for about half an hour, when the cycle of sweating and overheating began again. 

  We ate breakfast at the café, then the four of us trudged back down the bank to where another boatmen was waiting with his motorized canoe. The ELN base was located at a nearby lagoon called San Lorenzo. We sped along narrow rivers that were little more than streams, turning sharply round tight bends and sending our frothy, white wake crashing into the reedy banks. 

  I had promised Marsha I would phone her every day. I knew that a little detail like being in the middle of a tropical rain-forest would carry little or no weight with her should I not do so. There had been no phone at El Baigre, so I told Danny to ask the boatman to stop if there was a place with a phone.

  The canoe slowed as we suddenly came to a junction where four small rivers met. The boatman pointed to the bank and spoke to Danny. “He said that there’s a small village over there called ‘Four Mouths’ and it’s got a phone”, said Dan in a tone that sounded not at all pleased.

  “So let’s pull over for a minute”, I replied, puzzled. This was good news. In a few minutes I would be talking to my dearly beloved and getting myself off the hook for another day. 

  “It aint that easy, Norm”, Dan’s tone was still grim. “The boatman says that the ‘head-cutters’ have been active in this area recently and they may have attacked this village.”

  I digested the information and conjured up two images. One was of a death-squad comprising bloodthirsty cut-throats: the other was of an irate Marsha. It was no contest really. “Fuck ‘em, Dan. I’ve got to phone Marsha so let’s put ashore, eh.”

   There was a large hut situated right on the shore line, so we coasted in close by. Behind it, through the trees, could be seen similar huts with a narrow, earth road between them. All was deathly quiet and it seemed as if no one was about. 

  It was only at the last moment that we noticed the painted slogan daubed on the side of the hut in large, white letters. Danny translated, but I already knew that the letters A.U.C. stood for ‘Autodefensas de Colombia’, the preferred name of the Paramiliary death squads. So we now knew for sure that they had been here. The burning question was, were they still about?

Danny met me at Bogota Airport and was beside himself with excitement about the coming trip. Although he had been living in Colombia for over 20 years now, he had never been to the places where we would be going. He was adamant that no one had ever done this story before, to go down into the jungle and photograph and report on a working cocaine factory.

  Perhaps that should have told me something. Either that it was too impractical or too dangerous. However, I was committed now, I had taken ‘Front’s’ money and accepted the assignment. I would have to follow through no matter what.

  The first disappointment was Jorge. He was a pleasant, roly-poly sort of guy in his late thirties, who lived with his girlfriend, a much larger lady of a similar age, in her small but clean flat just a stones throw from the Presidential Palace. I guessed that the armed guard on the gate of the unpretentious block had more to do with the level of local crime than it did to its proximity to the Presidential Palace.

  The disappointment was that Jorge wasn’t really a photographer. He had been a TV cameraman for a national network until he had been laid off over two years ago. He was very polite, eager and willing, and you could tell that he desperately needed the money. However, even from my limited knowledge of photography, it was a profession quite distinct from that of cameraman. Anyway, it was too late to look for someone else and both Dan and I had cameras and yards of film. So if, between the three of us, we took several hundred photos, at least a couple should turn out okay.

  We were due to travel to the town of Barranca to meet Edgar. It was a jungle town insofar as every place outside the plateau city of Bogota was down in the jungle. Travel would be by plane, as most of the jungle roads were often impassable. Further, absolutely none of them were policed, except by the local guerillas or militias, and they were a law unto themselves so anything could happen. 

  The following afternoon the three of us presented ourselves at Bogota Airport for our flight to Barranca. If I had been surprised that internal Colombian flights were so cheap then I soon found out why. The battered, twin-engined, twenty-eight-seater Fokker had obviously seen long service. All the passengers turned to look at Danny and myself as we boarded, the only two Europeans on the flight.

  I suppose the 180 mile flight to the north of Bogota was uneventful, unless you count the roller-coaster ups and downs of the light plane being buffeted by the warm, jungle updrafts. The smoothness of international flight doesn’t prepare you at all for flight in a twin-engined Fokker.

  Edgar was waiting for us as we arrived. A tall, well-built, handsome guy in his late thirties, he had the impeccable manners of most Colombians that we had met. He quickly ushered us into a taxi, remarking that you had to be very careful with taxis as some of them were operated by criminals who would kidnap and rob you. 

  The ‘El  Pilaton’ was a decent enough hotel. We booked two double rooms then went to a nearby restaurant where Edgar filled us in on some background details. Then came the second disappointment. It seemed that Edgar wasn’t really a journalist. He said that he had worked as a journalist for 15 years, but for the last two years he had worked as a bouncer in a local nightclub. Now I knew that journalism was by no means an exclusive profession, I was living proof of that. But the transition from scribe to bouncer threw a lot of doubt on exactly what type of journalist he had been in the first place. 

  Seeing the look on my face as Danny translated, Edgar hastened to reassure me that the story could be done and that, in fact, he had been wanting to do this current story for 15 years, but the circumstances had never been right and he had never found anyone who wanted to do it. I pondered the implication that no one had been stupid enough to try. 

  Further details about our current location were something less than reassuring too. Edgar informed us that Barranca, a town of 370,000 souls, was claimed as home turf by all the parties to the conflict. At different times FARC, ELN, the Paramilitaries and the Colombian Army had all held sway here for a while. At the moment no one group enjoyed absolute power, but all were fighting to do so. Last year there had been 700 murders and 1,000 disappearances. Now the authorities didn’t bother to report massacres involving less than ten people. 

  In any other set of circumstances one could only have concluded that Edgar was joking. But his delivery was deadpan and absolutely matter-of-fact. As we got up to make our way back to the hotel he added, almost as an afterthought, that it was best that we stay close together as very few Europeans ever came to Barranca and there was a very real chance of being kidnapped. As a throw away line it really took the prize. Laying in my hotel room I couldn’t help thinking, if that was what he was willing to tell us, what had he held back?

  Disappointments were coming thick and fast now. The next arrived with breakfast. As I sat opposite Danny in the hotel dining room you could tell something was obviously very wrong. The normal boisterousness was gone and his complexion was the same hue as the milk he was pouring on his cornflakes. “I’m scared, Norm”, he suddenly blurted out. “I know this country and things are very dangerous here right now. The boatman who Edgar had hired to take us upriver has pulled out because FARC and ELN are fighting in that area.”

  I knew that we were going to have to make the rest of the journey by boat, because roads just didn’t run through the jungle. The hotel was situated on the bank of the river. The dirty brown water flowed swiftly past the dining room window where we sat. As I gazed into the middle distance I cursed Hollywood for making us all live filmic-ly now. I couldn’t help thinking about ‘Apocalypse Now’ and Martin Sheen’s boat trip into the ‘heart of darkness’.

  Danny suddenly brought me out of my reverie. “Edgar has managed to get us another boatman, Norm, but he say’s its very dangerous and that’s why I’m scared.” 

  I wouldn’t have described my own state of mind as ‘scared’, rather as ‘concerned but committed’. If I set my mind on doing something I tended to accept the dangers and just focused on achieving it. But the way Dan was going on,  my state of mind could soon change to ‘scared’. “Look Dan, I’m scared too, mate, but I’ve taken ‘Fronts’ money now and I’m committed to go through with it.”

  Danny’s reaction was characteristic. Suddenly he burst out laughing. “I didn’t say I wasn’t going, Norm. I’m just saying that I’m fucking scared.” That made me laugh too.  Danny was brave enough. He had run with West Ham’s ‘Inter City Firm’ for a while and you can’t be a faint heart and cope with that level of football violence. He had the loyalty that went with it too and the more I got to know him, the more I liked him. 

  The atmosphere changed somewhat as Edgar joined us at the breakfast table. For the worse. Over his toast he presented me with his scale of charges. It would be $300 to take us to our first stop, a jungle village about 80 miles upriver. Then it would be another $200 for the next leg to another village. He was just in the process of detailing the amount for the next leg, all pointed out on a little map he had spread out on the breakfast table, when I stopped him abruptly. 

  Anger flared as I waved my hand to silence him as internationally as I knew how. “Danny, you tell this prick that I’m not some kind of fucking idiot.” The anger was clear in my voice now, and in my expression too. Edgar sat back abruptly. “I want one price for the whole trip, start to finish. I can see what’s going to happen. We’ll get to the last stage and it will be some sort of $1,000 to get to the prize. By then I’ll be in for several hundred dollars anyway, so I won’t have much choice. Tell him, one price for the whole trip, or we call it quits now.”

  You could tell that Edgar was impressed. He had been nodding in agreement through my tirade without ever understanding one word I said. But he didn’t have to. No doubt he was a sharp cookie and knew all the moves. Now he knew that I knew them too. Apart from anything else, it was essential that I establish some sort of understanding with him right from the start. Now, at least, he knew that I wasn’t a mug.

  We agreed on the round sum of $1,000, an absolute fortune by Colombian standards. But, as he so rightly argued, he was risking his life for us. By now Jorge had joined us at the table. As he heard the final stages of the agreement his glum look perfectly matched the one Danny currently had on his face. I was paying them both $700 each. However, my irate state was enough to preclude any negotiations for an increase in their pay.

  Edgar was all smiles now. He leant across the table and shook my hand and I thought I saw a new respect there. I was frantically using all my prison-learned skills of summing a man up. I was reasonably sure he wasn’t an evil bastard. If I had got an inkling of that I would have had to watch him very closely indeed. There was always the possibility of his luring us somewhere and killing the lot of us for all the money. 

  In this new spirit of camaraderie, Edgar suddenly pulled a small box out of his pocket and offered the contents around. They were small pills of two distinct types. He explained that one was an anti-malaria tablet and that we should take it because the river was infested with mosquitoes. The other was a muscle-relaxant. It seemed that the constant battering of the boat by the river over the four-hour trip could seriously bruise your back. The experienced river traveler always took a muscle-relaxant.     

   We collected our bags from our rooms and, with Edgar leading, trudged down the muddy bank to the boat, or to give it its correct name, the canoe. The term ‘boat’ smacked of something substantial and there was little substantial about this craft. Basically, it was a 15-feet long, flat-bottomed punt, with an outboard motor at the back. That it regularly functioned as a punt was evidenced by the long pole held in the hands of the boatman as he welcomed us aboard.

  The latter, an elderly black guy, was all smiles as he steadied the boat with the pole whilst we settled into our seats. Or rather, benches, for these were bare, wooden boards without a trace of cushioning. Muscle-relaxants or no muscle-relaxants, I could still see my getting out at the other end with a sore bum.

  As we settled in, the boatman’s assistant, a teenaged boy, scurried about helping to stow our bags. With an absolute minimum of fuss the boatman pushed the boat away from the shore with his pole and started the outboard motor. Soon we were speeding along at about 30 miles an hour.

  Now I was starting to enjoy myself. This was the start of the adventure proper. I reminded myself that, whatever the outcome of the assignment, this would be the experience of a lifetime. Barely two years previously I had been sitting in a prison cell. Now I was speeding into the heart of the Colombian rainforest in pursuit of a cocaine factory.......

to be continued

                    Several months had now passed since my trip to Colombia to do the FARC story. Through that time I had stayed in regular contact with Danny, both by phone and e-mail. Apart from the fact that I now considered him to be a friend, I was always on the lookout for new and interesting stories. And Colombia was a country so rich in pathos that there seemed to be such stories everywhere. The problem, of course, was to get sufficiently good access to be able to cover them.

  Bearing in mind the fact that, in most people’s minds, Colombia is synonymous with cocaine, it was inevitable that I should be looking for a good cocaine story. One thing that had really surprised me on my release from prison was just how widely the drug culture had spread. In 1970 there was no such culture. A few people took pills of various types and others smoked grass, but it was very much a fringe group activity. Now drugs were everywhere. 

  Cocaine seemed to be especially upwardly mobile. Whereas previously the fringe drug culture had been largely a working class phenomenon, cocaine seemed to know no social boundaries. In fact, because it was so expensive vis a vis other drugs, it was very much the narcotic of choice for the middle and upper classes . Certainly in my meanderings around the media pubs, clubs, restaurants and bars in Soho, it seemed to be offered around with such regularity as to be almost the norm.

  So a story set in Colombia about cocaine production would excite the interest of a wide audience. I had asked Danny several times about just such a story and each time he said that he would see what he could arrange. It was no problem for him, or for anyone else for that matter, to make a good drugs connection in Colombia. Colombia was the world’s foremost producer of cocaine and if it wasn’t exactly acknowledged as their national product then it certainly underpinned their economy. There was massive corruption at every level.

  So if I had just wanted to buy cocaine, no matter in how big a quantity, that would have been no problem at all. Providing that my money was good and they thought me to be a trustworthy guy who would keep his mouth shut, then there would have been a queue of dealers lining up to serve me. As it was, the exact opposite was the case. Not only wasn’t I going to part with any money to buy so much as a gram of the stuff, I was also going to spread the tale all over the pages of a magazine. Quite clearly, there was very little that was attractive in this deal for the average Colombian narco-trafficker.

  Just as I was beginning to think that I should forget about the cocaine story, I received a phone call from a very excited Danny. “I’ve done it, mate. I’ve cracked it”, he shouted down the phone. It took a few seconds to calm him down then he told me that he had managed to find a Colombian journalist called Edgar, who could take us to a farm where the cocaine was grown and processed.

  Now if Danny had a fault, it was that he could be over-optimistic at times, especially when he had a vested interest in the outcome. I tried to tie him down to specifics. Who was the guy? Could he be trusted? Why didn’t he do the story himself? I bombarded Danny with questions.

  Whatever he was, Dan was no fool. He knew how to pitch something with the best of them. “Look Norm, this aint Camden town, you know. You can’t get a written guarantee that someone will give you this story. This is Colombia, a seriously fucked up country. There’s always going to be an element of chance. But I think that he’s genuine.”

  He had me. I had already seen something of the country and I knew that any venture whatsoever was always going to be something of a leap in the dark. I was going to have to put my reputation on the line with some magazine though. From a quick costing with Dan the story would cost over £3,000 in expenses. They wouldn’t thank me if I came back with nothing. However, Colombia was such a dramatic and visual country that I was sure that I could come back with something worthwhile.

  Now I had to decide who to pitch the story to. I had a good working relationship with ‘Front’ now and, out of loyalty, I should really offer it to them first. Further, they would take my word for it that I could get the story and would give me a large degree of autonomy. With ‘Loaded’ I would have to ‘sell’ them the story and they would have insisted on sending their own photographer. I certainly didn’t want Trent again, or anyone like him. Also, in an attempt to keep cost down, I had asked Danny if he could find a suitable Colombian photographer. That would save £500 for an airfare and his rates would be much cheaper.       

  Danny said that he had just the man. Jorge was a professional photographer, who would also put me up in his flat in Bogota, so saving money for a hotel. Working out the costings, I had already figured that I would probably have to underwrite some of the expense myself, so I was trying hard to keep costs down.

  Eoin was excited when I told him about the story, although he did blanche somewhat when I mentioned how much I thought it would cost. He asked me if I could guarantee the story and I had to be honest and say ‘ no’. I did assure him though that I wouldn’t be taking his money if I didn’t think that there was a very good chance of my coming back with the goods or dying in the attempt. 

  By now I had established a high degree of trust with him and he knew how fiercely committed I was when I went after a story. He laughed at my melodramatic remark and said, “We don’t want you getting killed for us, Norm, but if anyone can get this story I suppose it’s you.” With that compliment ringing in my ears, I started to make preparations for the trip.

  Firstly, I had to make a ‘pitch’ of an entirely different kind. In view of what had happened before, the word ‘Colombia’ was like red rag to a bull as far as Marsha was concerned. Not only was she still very pissed off at my not arriving in time for her birthday, she hadn’t enjoyed the story when she had read it in the magazine either. There were the issues of Lucero, the beautiful FARC guerilla and Danny’s and Trent’s visit to the brothel. Several apologies were followed by several wicked oaths to stay away from all Colombian women and not to go within shouting distance of any houses of ill repute whatsoever. This was all quite straightforward for me as I had no interest in pursuing either. My full concentration would be on staying alive.

  Discount the dangers as I may, this latest trip would be infinitely more dangerous that the trip to see FARC. Then I had been only in the hands of the one guerilla group, one with a finely attuned sense of public relations too. The chances of them killing me out of hand for merely covering what went on in their jungle capital had been quite remote.

  The cocaine story was a different kettle of fish entirely. If what I had heard was true, then virtually all parties to the conflict dealt, in one way or another, in cocaine. The group which controlled the particular territory where the coca leaf was grown taxed the trade, whether this be FARC, ELN, the Paramilitaries or the Colombian Army. None of these would take kindly to the notion of an English journalist coming into their territory and publicising the existence of farms openly producing cocaine. 

  Then there were the Americans. They were currently in the process of giving Colombia over one billion dollars as part of ‘Plan Colombia’ ostensibly to eradicate coca production. Whilst they might welcome a piece exposing FARC’s or ELN’s involvement, they certainly wouldn’t be pleased with something that showed the involvement of their allies, the Colombian Army, and the latter’s allies, the Paramilitaries. I would have to be very careful indeed.....

to be continued.

That evening there was some kind of Republican celebration scheduled. It was a celebration of the hunger strikes and those who had been involved in them. There were parades and marches up and down the Falls Road, at the side of which had been built a mock up of a prison cell. Various IRA men took turns to symbolically spend time in the ‘cell’, just wrapped in a blanket. 

  I walked with Anne through the packed streets and, even though I was the only Englishman there, I never felt under any kind of threat. The locals blamed the British Government for their problems, not the ordinary man in the street.

  Anne was everywhere. Shaking hands with this group and having a joke with that one. Often I was left for a while with a group of women from her street. Suddenly one of them put her hand to her mouth in surprise and muttered an involuntary, “Oh my God, it’s him.” 

  “For fuck’s sake don’t let her see him”, cried another as they milled about in confusion.

  I looked in the direction they were looking and saw a big, rangy guy of about fifty, standing with a group of men next to the mock up of the prison cell. Suddenly I was back in prison mode. I had come to like this Anne and the ‘chaps’ rules state quite clearly that should any man worthy of the name be in the company of a woman who is menaced by another man, then he must fight.

  I looked more closely at the man in question. He was about the same age as myself, but a good six inches taller and three to four stones heavier. Yet, in seconds, I was contemplating rolling about in the dust of the Falls Road with him. Coupled with the fact that he was quite obviously a local IRA hero and was standing with several of his mates, the prospects were daunting to say the least.

  I was just wondering how I would explain it all to Gerry in the morning when, suddenly, the problem solved itself. As the group of Anne’s friends rushed over and engaged her in earnest conversation about where they were all going next, the big guy and his mates drifted off in the other direction.

  The following morning I set off early for my meeting with Gerry. A twenty-minute walk along the Falls Road brought me to the Press Office. Lots of bars and grilles covered the doors and windows. I pressed the bell and waited patiently.

  The door opened almost immediately and an attractive young woman, her face wreathed in smiles, motioned me inside. I gave her my name and showed her my press card. “Oh we’re expecting you”, she said chirpily. “You’re Gerry’s friend from England. He won’t  be long. Please take a seat.”

  I sat in a small reception area and passed a few minutes reading the posters and newspaper cuttings hanging on the walls. I looked up quickly as a group came in, recognition dawning as I saw a familiar face. As the tall, heavily-bearded man walked up to me, my mind struggled to accept that Gerry could have changed so much. I instantly rejected the notion though, because I had seen recent photos of Gerry and he looked nothing like this. 

  The puzzle was soon solved when the man introduced himself as Gerry Adams. I had seen the leader of Sinn Fein many times on TV,  that was where the recognition had come from. He obviously knew who I was because, as we shook hands, he said that Gerry would be along in a minute.  

  The door opened again and suddenly Gerry was standing before me. The passage of nearly 25 years had added several kilos to his tall frame, but his still-youthful, well-nourished face belied his 47 years. We had never been close prison pals and Gerry had never subscribed to the criminal ethos, so there was no embracing and slapping of backs. There was a certain gravitas to Gerry Kelly now, legacy no doubt of his present role as a politician. He greeted me warmly though, whilst shaking my hand quite formally, almost ritually.

  He ushered me into his office and asked me if I would like tea. As we waited for the girl to bring it he asked me how I was and where I was staying. In truth, the pause before the interview proper gave me time to consider my approach. I wanted something more than just a formal interview. Any journalist could get that and, no doubt, Gerry did a dozen of those every day. He was friendly enough and his open, easy-going nature came across quite clearly. I would have to hope that, as we got into the subject matter, a more intimate Gerry would emerge.

  When I told him I was staying with Anne, up the Falls Road, he looked interested. He told me how she had everybody’s respect, that she had great spirit and had been a tireless fighter for the cause over many years. I told Gerry about how she had been showing me around and introducing me to people. When I got to the episode involving the previous evening, I asked who the man was that Anne’s friends had been so keen to keep her from seeing. 

  Gerry looked thoughtful for a moment, then serious. “It’s a great shame, Norman, a tragedy really. Another way that the troubles have wrecked lives and families. That man was Sean M……… He was one of the original hunger strikers and an IRA volunteer over many years. He was married to Anne. She traveled all over the country to visit and support him. However, through his countless legal actions against the government, he became very close with his solicitor. She was a younger, quite well-to-do woman from the South. They fell in love and, when he got out, he divorced Anne and married her. Anne took it quite badly. Apart from anything else it was a very public humiliation. It was a bad business altogether.” For a moment he was lost in thought, gazing into the middle distance.

  At that point the arrival of the tea made for a welcome interruption. As we settled down with our respective cups Gerry asked me what it was I wanted from him.

  I explained the theme I had in mind, that we had both once been ‘men of war’ and were now ‘men of peace’. The story would be one about what we had been through to get here. I mentioned that a good starting point might be when we had last met. I had just been shipped out of the Scrubs, leaving Ian and himself to carry on with the escape.

  It was a good conversational ploy, because, within seconds, Gerry was lost in the details of that adventure those 25 years previously.

  “It came as a shock, of course, you’re being moved. Luckily though, we knew where you had hidden the key. We stole two warder’s uniforms from the laundry and altered them to fit Ian and myself. How is Ian, by the way?” he paused as the memory of his old friend intruded.  

  I explained that partway through his 25-year sentence Ian’s mind had snapped and that he had never recovered. He lived in much reduced circumstances in North London now. I still saw him regularly, but he wasn’t the same man.

  “It happened to many of ours, Norman , and it’s always a great tragedy. Please give him my best regards when next you see him. Now where was I? Oh yes, one Saturday afternoon, with several of our friends looking out for us, we changed into the uniforms in Tommy’s cell down on the ‘ones. You know, it was close to the end of the wing. We came out and had to walk past all those prisoners watching TV, before we could let ourselves out of the gate at the end of the wing. Of course, several people recognized us. A couple actually got up out of their seats, probably to go and tell the warders. But our friends made them sit down again until it was all over.” 

  “Anyway, we crossed the yard to the laundry with no problem. Ian quickly knocked the padlock off the gate with a hammer and we let ourselves into the laundry with the key.”

  “Where you found the ladder”, I interjected quickly.

  “Hell no”, said Gerry animatedly, “that was the first thing to go wrong.” He was caught up in the story now and had relaxed considerably with me. This was precisely what I had intended.

  “We broke into the Works store and there was no ladder. They must have left it somewhere else that weekend. So we had to improvise. We broke struts off the big laundry benches and nailed them to a pair of step-ladders. It wasn’t ideal, but we thought it would do the job. Then we let ourselves out of the laundry again and ran at the fence.”

  He paused momentarily as the memory of that fear-charged moment was with him again. They were running blind. There could have been a dog patrol, with two warders and two dogs, just around the corner and they would have run smack into them. But there was no way of knowing that. This part was left purely to chance. 

  “But our luck was in”, he continued. “Wherever the dog patrols were, they weren’t in that area. We slammed the ladder up against the fence to make good contact. We knew that the slightest touch would set the alarms off anyway and we wanted to get up first time. But as I went up, I saw a dog patrol come running round the corner. I had just reached the top when they got to the bottom of the ladder. They pulled it and it snapped and Ian, who was only halfway up, fell to the ground. There was nothing I could do for him.”

  He looked directly at me, then paused, just as he must have paused in the heat of the moment, perched on top of the wire-mesh fence all those years ago. A man as loyal as Gerry would have considered the plight of his fellow escaper and friend. But, as he said, there was nothing he could have done and, in fact, Ian himself had confirmed as much to me. 

  “Ian shouted for me to carry on, so I dropped to the floor, between the fence and the wall now. Over in the corner, where the two walls met, a cable hung down from the CCTV camera. I knew that I could reach it. It took a couple of tries, but at last I grabbed it. I pulled myself up and scrambled on top of the wall.” 

  “So all you had to do now was to drop down and run to the car we had arranged to be left in the hospital car park”, I observed.

  “No, that was the final thing to go wrong”, responded Gerry. “I had estimated that I would take less than a minute from the time I got over the fence to the time I climbed the wall, but I had taken more than three times that. Now there were twenty warders between me and the car.”

  “So you enjoyed the view whilst it lasted?”, I added.

  “I certainly felt more free than I had for a long while”, said Gerry, smiling broadly.

  “So what happened next”, I asked?

  “I climbed back down quickly enough and they took me over to the segregation block and beat me up.” He screwed up his face at the memory.

  “We should have warned you about that bit”, I said, laughing. “Now I don’t feel nearly so bad about missing the escape. So where did you go next?”

  Gerry was laughing too now. “To Long Lartin, but not for very long”, he continued. The IRA had declared a cease-fire and the fate of my co-defendants and myself had become part of the negotiations with the British Government. It was all very hush hush. They were saying one thing publicly about not negotiating with the IRA and doing something quite different in secret. The Price sisters had already been sent back to Ireland. They were still only young girls really and their health was very poor. Hugh Feeney and I weren’t long behind them. We were taken to Heathrow and flown to Belfast. We spent a week in the old Crumlin Road jail, then we were granted political status and put in Long Kesh, what the British called ‘The Maze’.”

  “But thanks to me you had a bad case of permanently itchy feet”, I said, laughing.

  Gerry laughed with me. “I was always going to try to escape, Norman, with or without your initial encouragement. You see, as a member of the IRA, I saw myself as a prisoner of war and it was my duty to try to escape. In 1977 I tried to escape from a military hospital. In 1979 I tried again at Long Kesh and also failed to get away from another military hospital in 1982.”

  “I suppose that having political status meant that they couldn’t do much to punish you. There was no remission to take away”, I observed.

  “No but Thatcher did something much worse”, replied Gerry animatedly. “She was determined to portray us as common criminals rather than political prisoners, so she took away our political status. It was something we couldn’t take lying down. We had to make a response. Fortunately we had been planning a big escape from Long Kesh for a while. 

  It was never going to be easy, because the ‘Kesh’ was Europe’s most heavily guarded prison. Warders manned the inside and the British Army guarded the outside. Each of the top security H blocks could only be opened from the outside, with a key held at the gate.”

  Gerry paused, no doubt to mentally fortify himself against the memories of the dramatic event, before launching himself into the story again. “We smuggled in guns and knives and took over the wing. Then we grabbed the next shift as they came on. Now we waited until the meals lorry came to the wing and we grabbed that. By now, of course, many of us were dressed in warder’s uniforms.”

  “Mind you, it wasn’t as simple and as smooth as I’ve just described it. Already, a warder had resisted and been shot in the head. Then, as we drove the meals lorry towards the gate with all the lads in the back, a warder coming on duty recognized a couple of us in the front and pulled his car in front of the gate. At the last minute we managed to ram the lorry through a side gate and then a pitched battle broke out between us and the warders in the gate-house. That’s when the warder was killed. Although he was stabbed he actually died of a heart attack. He’d had a heart attack previously.”

  “”I wouldn’t have fancied your chances of proving that if you’d come to trial in an English court”, I remarked.

  “No, neither would I”, continued Gerry. “It was all very unfortunate and not intended. We wanted to get away with as least fuss as possible. Anyway, 38 of us got away, 11 were recaptured almost immediately and several more were caught over the next few weeks. I got clean away. At first I was on the run in the border areas, then I went abroad. I was free for just over 30 months, then a special Dutch unit arrested me in Amsterdam.”

  “I suppose there are worse countries you could have been caught in”, I broke in. “The Dutch are very fair in their interpretation of international law, aren’t they?”

  “ Not that fair”, responded Gerry, “In fact they were very pro the British Government. However, they refused to extradite me on the basis of my conviction for the Old Bailey bombing on the grounds that it was a political act, but they still sent me back. Then it all became very strange. In Ireland I was placed on remand over charges arising out of the escape. Then one morning the prison Governor summoned me to his office. He was trying hard to be civil, but you could see that he was very annoyed about something. Suddenly he got out a big, official-looking parchment and began to read from it in very old-fashioned language. The gist of it was that I was being given a free pardon for my role in the Old Bailey bombing and my life sentence was set aside.”

  “I’ve known men in English jails who have lodged appeals for 20 years and never got that”, I said in surprise.

  “Yes I suppose I was very lucky, Norman. And my luck continued to get better. For my role in the escape I was sentenced to only five years and sent back to the ‘Kesh’. As I had already served a couple of years on remand I only had about 13 months left to do. So I immersed myself in studying politics. When I got out in 1989, I joined Sinn Fein, rather than the IRA. It was an option open to Republicans who wanted some kind of life for themselves, as opposed to a life on the run all the time.”

  “So the ‘man of war’ really did turn into the ‘man of peace’, Gerry?”

  “It was a time for peace, Norman. In 1990 I was involved with Martin McGinnis in conflict resolution. We were negotiating with Loyalist gangs who were killing Catholics. At about this time the British Government insisted that, rather than being appointed by Sinn Fein, us negotiators had to be elected. In 1996 I was elected to a negotiating body called ‘The Forum’. Within two years we had helped to produce the ‘Good Friday Agreement’. In 1998 I stood as a Sinn Fein candidate for the ‘Legislative Assembly’, the devolved Government for Northern Ireland, and was elected.”

  “So it’s ‘Assemblyman Kelly’ now is it Gerry?” I asked, laughing.

  “Plain Gerry will do from you, Norman”, he was laughing too.

  “You’ve come a long way from Wormwood Scrubs all those years ago. Any regrets, Gerry?”

  He looked thoughtful for a moment. “Lots of regrets and I wouldn’t know where to start if I had to list them. For the Nationalist community it has always been viewed as a war. And in a war there are always casualties, on both sides. I regret all the dead and all the injured on both sides. All we can hope is that some good will come out of it now and Ireland will finally find some peace.”

  We had been talking for quite a while now and I was rapidly running out of questions. I remembered one last thing though. “Talking of peace, President Clinton visited recently to assist the peace process and you spent some time talking to him. Do you feel he was sincere, or was it a cynical move on his part to try to influence the Irish vote back in the US?”   

  “Clinton was very well briefed, Norman, and he has used his influence in a very positive way. He has opened up the White House to us in a way that no other US President ever has. Not even Eamon De Valera was invited to the White House, but Gerry Adams has been in and out of the place regularly.”

  At this point the phone rings and, suddenly, Gerry is doing a down-the-line interview as part of a nationally broadcast, live radio program. I listen to him speak, articulate, knowledgeable, the consummate politician now. Then it is the unseen Unionist’s turn. I watch Gerry’s brow furrow as he shakes his head in frustration. Then he stares wistfully out of the window as if wishing himself far away. And he is far away as far as I am concerned. I have lost him to his electorate, which is as it should be.

  Seizing my opportunity I tap him on the arm to get his attention and motion towards the door to signify that I am leaving. He quickly shakes my hand and mouths a silent ‘Goodbye’. Gerry Kelly, Nationalist politician, Irish rebel, has certainly come a long way since the last time we met.

        On March 8^th 1973 a massive car bomb exploded outside the Central Criminal Court, commonly known as the Old Bailey, in central London. Shortly afterwards a second bomb exploded outside government offices just off Whitehall. The police found and defused a third car-bomb parked outside Scotland Yard. Although telephone warnings had been given, one person was killed, 214 injured and massive damage was done to property.

  The attack bore all the hallmarks of the IRA. There had been near-simultaneous bombings in Belfast and Dublin, and it came on the eve of an Ulster ‘Border Referendum’. Some kind of symbolic act on the part of the IRA had been expected. The telephone warning, complete with an identification code, came as confirmation, if that had been needed.

  Shortly afterwards, the police arrested ten members of the IRA unit responsible, as they sat on a plane at Gatwick, waiting to fly to Dublin. Mostly, they were young and inexperienced ex-students. Gerry Kelly, their leader, was 20, the Price sisters both 19 and there was a girl of 16. At their trial later however, the judge remarked that it was one of the gravest crimes ever committed in this country and handed down life sentences to all involved.

  I had noticed the bombings, but only to worry if family and friends had been caught up in them. Even then, it stayed at the periphery of my attention. I was three years into my own life sentence and my full concentration was on trying to escape. That, together with a natural rebelliousness, had ensured many long months in punishment blocks in solitary confinement and often on a bread and water diet too. I lived in a world of pain.

  Following an unsuccessful escape attempt and the ensuing riot at Albany Prison on the Isle of Wight, I was transferred to Wormwood Scrubs. The latter was a comparatively easy prison, with plenty of facilities and lots of time allowed out of cell. Mostly, it was a jail for ‘model’ prisoners, first offenders and those who were no trouble to the prison authorities. 

  If it seemed a strange move for a man like myself, who had so recently been involved in so much trouble, then there was a method in the Home Office’s madness. Sometimes they located a troublesome prisoner in an easy jail like the Scrubs to isolate him from other troublesome prisoners and so minimize his disruptive potential. Further, they hoped that the troublesome inmate would take to the good conditions and behave accordingly. 

  In my case, I decided to let the authorities think that I was settling down. However, although the Scrubs was a top-security, Category A jail, there were weaknesses in its security that I had not seen in other top security jails. I resolved to bide my time and plan an escape.

  A major problem was that, in a jail full of model prisoners, virtually no one wanted to go. This is despite some extremely long sentences ranging from four years right up to 30 years and life. That isn’t to say that I couldn’t have found someone willing to have a go, but they were either thoroughly untrustworthy and may have told the authorities, or they were naïve and weak. I secretly schemed away whilst waiting for someone more reliable to arrive.  

  If ‘the chaps’ are a self-defined group of criminals who are stronger, more professional in their approach to crime and more trustworthy, then there were very few ‘chaps’ at the Scrubs. Most of these worked in the prison laundry. I knew or was known to most of them. I too got a job in the laundry.

  A year passed and suddenly Ian, a close friend of mine, arrived. He too had recently been in escape attempts and riots and the authorities were trying out exactly the same approach with him as they had with me. 

  I got him a job in the laundry with me and explained how far I had got with my planning. Through a corrupt civilian worker I had managed to get my hands on an impression of a gate key. I sent this outside and had the finished key smuggled back in again. Now I could pass through any gate in the jail. 

  I had noticed that the prison Works Department sometimes left an extending ladder in the locked laundry over the weekend, chained and padlocked to a wall inside a store. The laundry was a one-storied building that lay across a yard, barely 20 yards from the long- term wing where Ian and myself were housed. It would be possible to let ourselves out of the wing using the key and cross the yard to the laundry. There was a padlock that secured the laundry gate, which could be easily knocked off. Then it was just a matter of letting ourselves through the gate with the key.

  Once inside it would take seconds to knock the padlock off the chain that secured the ladder. Wormwood Scrubs however, had two layers of perimeter security. First, there was a 20 feet high, wire-mesh fence. This had barbed wire at the top and trembler bells that sounded the alarm if they were shaken. Then there was an outside wall of similar height. Both were liberally festooned with CCTV cameras that were monitored in a central control room. 

  Quite clearly, once the ladder hit the first fence it would sound the alarm and we would have only a very short time to get over. It would be optimistic in the extreme to expect that the two of us could climb the ladder and have time to pull it up to use again on the outside wall. Patrolling guards with dogs would be on the scene too soon and would grab the bottom of the ladder.   

  However, the outside wall could be climbed with a rope and hook. There was abundant material to make the rope out of. This could be done beforehand and the rope hidden away in the laundry. The Work’s Department also had a locked store located in the laundry. This could be easily broken into and the tools used to make some sort of hook. In theory, it was an entirely feasible plan.

  Ian immediately pointed out that the two of us would have more chance of getting away if we had two more people in on the escape. My reply to that was to ask where we would find two such people. Ian was much more gregarious than I, and mixed more extensively on the wing. He suggested a young guy called Malcolm and Gerry Kelly.

  I knew something of Malcolm, but only because of all the trouble he had been in at other jails. Still only 20, he had done many months of punishment for rebelling against the warders. Criminally though, he was very naïve and had never stolen anything in his life. He was fanatical about politics though, and was a libertarian. He was sentenced to ten years for fire-bombing his local town hall. Malcolm was brave enough and certainly trustworthy.

  Gerry Kelly was another kettle of fish entirely. Physically unimposing, he still had the slim, be-spectacled, owlish look of the student he had so recently been. However, I had to agree with Ian that he was probably brave enough and could definitely be trusted not to betray us to the authorities.  As far as the criminal pecking order on the long-term wing was concerned, both were virtual nobodies. But as Ian pointed out, you didn’t have to be one of ‘the chaps’ to qualify for a place on our escape. They were friends of Ian’s rather than friends of mine, so I told him to ask them if they were interested. 

  Early planning meetings immediately revealed a gulf between our respective ideologies. Apart from organising the escape, Ian and I had agreed to provide a hiding place in London until we could leave the country. As this latter move would take a couple of weeks to organize, we would have to spend this period in London.

  Ian mentioned that, before he had been arrested, he had been looking at a ‘bit of work’ involving the armed robbery of a main Post Office sorting depot. He said that the prize could be as much as £100,000. Ian suggested that the four of us rob the depot to provide us with much-needed money to go ‘on the run’ with. 

  There was an embarrassed silence. Malcolm spoke first, stating quite unequivocally that it was against his principles to steal. Probably encouraged by this, Gerry added that this was also his position, He went on to say that he was just a bomber and that others did the robbing. Temporarily confused by this concise definition of the division of labour within the IRA, I could only mutter that he could always give his share to the organisation, but he wasn’t to be swayed. They were both on board for only the escape. 

  As things turned out, I was overtaken by events. A prisoner had been killed in the punishment block and there were allegations that the warders had done it. Questions were raised in the local press. To keep up the pressure, many of the inmates of the long-term wing took part in a sit-down protest. I was a leading organiser of the protest. For my pains I was shipped out to another prison, as was Malcolm. Ian and Gerry though carried on with the escape.

  Over the years I had occasionally seen references to Gerry in the press. I was aware that, on release from prison, he had joined Sinn Fein, the political wing of the IRA and was currently an elected member of the Northern Ireland Assembly, the devolved government involving all parties to the conflict in Northern Ireland.

  So, just as I had transformed myself from a violent gangster into a writer and journalist, so, it would seem, had Gerry turned from a ‘man of war’ to a ‘man of peace’. I thought that it would make for a good story for me to go to Belfast and do an interview with him, picking up where we had left off some quarter of a century earlier.

  Eoin, who came from the Republic of Ireland himself and most probably had considerable Republican sympathies, thought it was a great idea. He commissioned me to do the piece for ‘Front’. 

  There were a couple of immediate problems. Firstly, I hadn’t been in touch with Gerry for nearly 25 years. I would have to find a way of doing so. Secondly, how would he remember me? We had been comrades rather than close friends and he most certainly hadn’t agreed with my professional pursuit of crime. Lastly, there was the ‘Front’ factor. How would he react to doing an interview for a ‘lad’s mag’?

  The first problem I solved by phoning the Sinn Fein office in Belfast. I was soon put through to Gerry Kelly’s secretary, Margaret. I explained who I was and what I wanted to do. I said that I wrote for an English men’s life-style magazine with a circulation in the hundreds of thousands. I added that the theme of the article would be that we had both transformed ourselves into ‘men of peace’. 

  All this was perfectly true. What I didn’t mention was ‘Front’s’ name, in the hope that the ‘lads mag’ phenomenon hadn’t yet reached Belfast. Margaret asked me to phone back the following day.

  When I did so, Margaret told me that, of course, Gerry remembered me and would be pleased to do an interview. I would have to come to Belfast though, as none of Sinn Fein’s elected MPs had taken up their right to sit in the House of Commons.

  I came in to land at Belfast International Airport late in the evening and it was nearing midnight as my taxi pulled up outside the Community Centre in the Falls Road that I had been directed to by Margaret. The articulate young Irishman who was manning the upstairs reception desk was obviously expecting me. He informed me that certain members of the community put guests up for bed and breakfast. It was relatively cheap and provided an opportunity for the visitor to get a feel for the local community. This is what had been organised for me.

  It was a five-minute taxi ride to a street half a mile further up the Falls Road. As we pulled up at the gate of a terraced house, a short, middle-aged woman hurried down the path to meet me. She introduced herself as Anne and, grabbing my bag, bustled me into the house.

  The house was spotlessly clean, if unostentatiously furnished. Anne made me a cup of tea and we sat at a kitchen table together. Even sitting down, she was filled with a boundless energy. Over the next hour she regaled me with stories from ‘the troubles’, in many of which she had played an active role. She emphasised that she had never been a member of the IRA or taken part in any ‘terrorist’ activity. But there had been many other ways the local community had supported their men and women who had been members.

  Anne was a great talker and funny with it too. With a liberal use of expletives she made even dramatic incidents sound humourous, without ever once sounding crude. It became clear to me that women like Anne had been the backbone of the fight for justice in Northern Ireland. Without her and thousands like her, the IRA could never have reached the point they had now. 

  All of a sudden I was dead tired. The traveling and the lateness of the hour had combined to make me nod as I sat at the table. “Come on, off to bed with you now”  barked Anne, startling me awake. She ushered me upstairs to my bedroom and, promising me breakfast when I arose in the morning, wished me ‘goodnight’.

  Breakfast with Anne was a case of more of the same, but it was never boring. Her fund of interesting stories seemed endless. From time to time, neighboring women and their children popped in and out. Anne was a virtual surrogate mother to several kids. I had noticed that she had no children of her own and there seemed to be no trace of a man about the house. Also, there was a carefully disguised sadness about her that she put on a brave face to hide. But I didn’t pry. No doubt she would tell me her circumstances if she thought it relevant.

  My appointment with Gerry Kelly was for the following day. The Press Office sent their apologies, but explained that there were important meetings scheduled for today. So I had a whole day to kill. Anne indicated that I could accompany her on her daily round if I so desired. It seemed a great way to learn more about the local Catholic community and Republicanism in general. That would help me to put people like Gerry Kelly in context.

  Half way up her street there was a small community centre and gardens. These had been built from a grant from the European Community Fund. Anne mentioned that, as peace began to break out, every household had also received a £10,000 grant for improvements from the same fund.

  The community centre performed a multitude of functions, from serving as a simple meeting place to sorting out local people’s problem. It was all done on an informal basis, using volunteers. So there was none of the antagonism common to such places in mainland England, where the local authority was viewed as the ‘them’ as opposed to ‘us’.

In fact, the whole phenomenon of the local community spirit was amazing, especially to a Londoner like myself, where one might never speak to a neighbour although living next door to them for ten years.

  Walking down the street with Anne, people would call out and come over to talk. People were forever popping in and out of each others houses. She invariably introduced me as ‘Gerry’s friend from England.’ 

  Gable ends decorated with Republican wall-art leapt out of their gloomy, working class surroundings. Here a gigantic mural celebrating the life and death of hunger striker Bobby Sands: there a roll call of IRA men and women killed in ‘the troubles’. I reflected that, in most communities, the dead stayed only in the graveyard. Here, in Republican West Belfast, they were alive and living in the community.

   Republican graffiti though, wasn’t the only kind. I noticed several instances of ‘Fuck the IRA’ and other less-than-complimentary slogans painted on walls. I thought that it had been done by the Loyalists. “No, it’s the fucking yobboes”, corrected Anne. Like any other urban community, it seemed that West Belfast suffered at the hands of teenaged joy-riders, vandals and their ilk. 

  As the organisation responsible for policing their community, this problem had become the responsibility of the IRA. Some of their methods had been very direct. Generally, they were supported in this by the majority, however, some yobboes and their families obviously felt otherwise.

  I had intimated to Anne that I would like to meet Roy, another old IRA friend from prison, whilst I was here. Roy was much more in the ‘Irish rascal’ mode than Gerry and I could expect a more gritty low-down on what it was really like on ‘the street’ from him.

  Within half an hour I was given the address of an old warehouse several streets away. 

  Roy was expecting me and we hugged each other warmly. We had shared some tough times in jail. Now though, we were both out on the street and very pleased to be so. We had both weathered the experience well.

  The first 20 minutes was spent asking about old friends. Then we got around to talking about the peace process. Although he spoke positively about it, he was quite cynical. “The Loyalists know we’ve won, because we’re out-breeding the bastards”, he laughed. I took this to be a reference to the fact that the Catholic community, where contraception was largely eschewed, had a much higher birthrate than the Protestant community, where it wasn’t.

  On the subject of the ‘yobboes’, Roy was quite matter of fact about it. “Some of them are a fucking nuisance and make people’s lives a misery”, he said. He also added that many of them were on drugs  which they bought off the Loyalist gangs in East Belfast. 

  “Some people say that the IRA deal in drugs”, I said, looking Roy right in the eye. 

  “We shoot drug dealers”, replied Roy quite deadpan and staring straight back. It was ‘point taken’. The idea of the IRA selling drugs in their own communities was never really accepted by me. Knowing the strong principles of people like Gerry Kelly, I knew it would never be allowed. 

I must have dozed in the heat and the grip of fever. I awoke to the echoing sound of the mullah calling the faithful to prayer. He must have had quite incredible stamina, for he kept it up for several hours. I briefly considered, then dismissed, the idea of going out onto the balcony and yelling for him to shut up. 

  With my stomach still firmly in the grip of ‘Baghdad Belly’, food was the furthest thing from my mind. Instead, I decided to take a leisurely stroll in the hotel gardens. As soon as I appeared in the lobby, several swarthy, moustached flunkeys surrounded me. Where was I going? Did I want a car? They looked perplexed when I said I was just going for a walk.

  The extensive gardens must have been quite beautiful once, but now cracked paving, broken lights and dry fountains complemented the look of the hotel perfectly. A handful of fellow guests strolled the pathways as wild cats scurried across the shabby lawns.

  Having once been a career criminal, I now have a finely tuned talent for observation. I soon became aware of several large, moustached men in white shirts and dark trousers, sweating profusely, who came hurrying along paths, visibly slowing when they saw me and then, not quite knowing what to do with themselves. As a surveillance operation it was worthy of Inspector Clouseau. But clearly they were worried about me and didn’t trust me. I would have to be careful.

  On Tuesday morning Mohammed told me he had arranged an outing for me the following day. He would provide a driver and a photographer. He would be the guide. The catch was, it would cost me. The driver was 50 US dollars a day, the photographer was 100 dollars and the assistance of the Press Office another 50 dollars per day, whether I used it or not! And this in a country where the average government monthly salary was $4. It was quite a nice little racket they had running out of the Press Office. But what could I do? It was either pay, or no story.

  Probably incensed by the rip-off, that evening I escaped from the hotel. I made as if to walk around the gardens, slid quickly alongside the car park and strolled briskly out of the gate. Wherever Clouseau’s men were they definitely weren’t with me. I was free, loose in Baghdad.

  The evening sun was still oppressive, but at least I could breathe. The roads were clogged with the most run-down cars I had ever seen, all very old models, with dents discoloured by rust, and with cracked and broken windscreens. As they set off from the traffic lights they resembled nothing so much as some vast demolition derby. Apart from a few, new four-wheel-drives, the only other new vehicles on the roads were the big, red double-decker buses supplied by the Chinese.

  Armed troops were everywhere, outside buildings, in sentry boxes, crouched in bunkers and walking in groups. At virtually every intersection, armed police directed the traffic. But whatever their respective roles, they were totally oblivious to me. I walked unchallenged along streets and through alleyways, past building so decrepit I feared that,  should someone slam a door too hard, half of Baghdad would collapse.

  However, whatever Saddam’s reputation for strong government, he obviously couldn’t handle the local dustmen’s union. Great piles of festering rubbish stood everywhere, even outside food shops. The shops themselves were generally well stocked though, but it was all cheap crap from China. 

  The people were surprisingly friendly, especially in view of the fact that we and the Yanks were still bombing them on a regular basis. But the Arabs have a great tradition of hospitality. Unlike us Brits. We’re still rude to the Germans 60 years on.

  I decided to change some money. One hundred dollars US brought me eight thick wads of Iraqi dinars and a carrier bag to take it away in. It used to be three dinars to the dollar, now it’s closer to 2,000.

  In one particularly poor neighbourhood, I saw children renting rides from a man with bicycles. Under a bridge, a small funfair with rides all pushed by hand catered to a crowd of children with their parents. On patches of waste ground there were impromptu games of football. The overwhelming impression was one of abject poverty. It was quite clear that the sanctions have hit ordinary Iraqis very hard.

  They haven’t stopped Saddam from building luxurious palaces and strikingly grand and dramatic monuments though. They stand, incongruous in their opulence, amongst the crumbling slums. Everywhere, giant depictions of Saddam stare down on passers-by. I learned that, at the New Year’s Day military parade, there had been an impressive display of millions of dollars worth of the latest armoured vehicles and missiles, together with thousands of well-armed troops. 

  The following morning I met Mohammed at the Press Office and, together with the photographer, set off in the driver’s old, black Buick. Mohammed informed me that we were on our way to see the Quds or Jerusalem Army, a group of women volunteers who were undergoing military training in order to liberate Palestine from the Israelis.

  We arrived at Al Mustinsiriya University where they were based and met with instant confusion. There had been some mistake, because they only trained on weekends. So for any Mossad agents who happen to be reading this, Jerusalem’s safe on weekdays.

  We then drove to the bombed air raid shelter at Amiriya, which had become a shrine. As I entered the low, squat structure I was met by Miriam, a young woman in a chador, who was to be my guide.

  The inside of the shelter was quite well lit, courtesy of remembrance candles and a gaping hole in the six feet thick concrete roof. Miriam explained how the first missile had drilled its way through the concrete before exploding. The second missile flew in horizontally through an extractor fan and incinerated everyone who hadn’t already been killed. As she spoke we walked past walls grimed with soot. 

  There had been 408 women, children and old men killed in the shelter, Egyptians, Jordanians and Iraqis, both Christian and Muslim. They had been sleeping in three-tiered bunks, with the children in the top row. When the second missile had exploded, burning children had been thrown upwards. Miriam stopped and pointed out charred remains of little hands and feet, still sticking to the ceiling ten years after the bombs had been dropped.

  Further on we stopped at a wall where people had been burned, Hiroshima-like, into the concrete. Miriam pointed to the outline of a young woman and that of a child’s leg from thigh to ankle. And there, peering out of the darkness at me, was the face of a young girl. She had vapourised, leaving just the pink skin of her face on the wall.

  I’m tough enough, but I don’t mind confessing that as I walked out past photos of the young children as they had been, tears streamed freely down my face. Smart bombs? It’s a shame the people who aim them are so fucking dumb!

  Our next stop was at a museum dedicated to the reconstruction work that had been done to war-damaged buildings. I walked through vast, dusty halls, past hundreds of display cases containing scale models depicting the buildings before and after repair. There were models of refineries, factories and bridges, but what surprised me were the number of schools, hospitals and mosques that had also been targeted. No wonder the Russians had referred to the Yanks as ‘20^th century barbarians’.

  We drove around, stopping at a couple of locations so that the photographer could take some street scenes for me. Mohammed constantly hovered, controlling everything. Sometimes it was okay to shoot in one direction but not another, because that would take in sensitive buildings. In view of the number of assassination attempts there have been against Saddam, security was obviously still a major consideration.

  As we couldn’t see the Quds Army until Saturday, I had two days to kill. I hadn’t been given permission to see anything else and the outings were proving to be so expensive my budget didn’t allow for much else. 

  To take advantage of the 50 dollars a day I was paying the Press Office, I tried to engage Mohammed in conversation as often as I could. However, there was a whole range of topics that were off limits for discussion, so he wasn’t a source of much information for me. After one conversation he did look thoughtful though. I had mentioned the idea of arranging a ‘Live Aid’ style concert in Baghdad to emphasize the plight of Iraqi children under the sanctions. I suggested that I could try to interest some pop celebrities in England and, apart from a concert for the children, we could raise some money for much needed medicines.

  I had been back in my room for no more than 20 minutes when the phone rang. It was Mohammed. He asked me to come to the Press Office immediately as something important had come up. I hurried over and was met by a very agitated Mohammed. It seemed that he had mentioned my idea to someone higher up and now a Minister wanted to speak with me.

  I was ushered into the building next door and into a plush lift. I emerged into a carpeted hallway and entered a similarly plush office. Seated behind a large, leather-covered desk sat a small, dapper man with a thin moustache. With no preliminaries whatsoever, he asked me about my idea in perfect English.

  I explained the principle behind ‘Live Aid’, adding that it not only raised money but also people’s awareness of problems.  It put pressure on Governments to act. It could well lead to a lessening of the sanctions. The Minister sat there, nodding all the while, but saying nothing. Right at the end he piped up. “But what music will they be playing”, he asked?

  “Well, Western pop music, I suppose”, was my reply.

  “Can’t stand the stuff”, came the Minister’s instant response, “can’t they play  something classical? That really was the end of the conversation as far as I was concerned. I just couldn’t picture Bob Geldorf on third violin.

   On the Friday I found a driver who was willing to take me to Babylon, 40 dollars no questions asked. We slipped out of the hotel early and were soon speeding out of Baghdad along well-maintained roads. But in view of the fact that tarmac virtually seeps out of the ground here, perhaps well-maintained roads wasn’t too great a feat.

  Babylon, that great, mystical city of antiquity, was something of a disappointment. Only the foundations were original, the rest of the walls had been built out of new bricks. Any comfort I might have taken from the fact that Saddam had forebore to smother the place with great murals of himself, was dispelled by the realization that he had had his name engraved on nearly every brick!

  Saturday saw me at the University again with Mohammed, the photographer and the driver. Even on a weekend the campus was swarming with students, and so I took this opportunity to study them more closely. To a soul, they were a clean, wholesome-looking lot, not an orange punk haircut or pierced body-part in sight. In fact, they actually looked like they were there to study.

  The women all wore long, ankle-length dresses, which must have been quite uncomfortable in the heat. I didn’t actually enquire about specific sexual practices, but what with the climate, the dress and the religious restrictions, I feel confident in stating that there is absolutely no muff-diving whatsoever in the Middle East.

  On a parade ground to the rear of the University we found the Quds Army. About 200 young women, aged between 16 and 30 and smartly dressed in well-pressed, sand-coloured fatigues, marched up and down under the direction of regular army officers.

  It was explained to me that, in this first two weeks, they just learned to march. In the second two weeks they marched carrying guns. In the final two weeks they went to the army assault course to learn how to use the guns. Quite clearly, I was only going to be allowed to watch this simple marching.

  As they marched the women sang, “The enemy may have American weapons, but we have a genuine Tikritian hero.” Saddam comes from Tikrit, so no prizes for guessing who wrote those lyrics then.

  Back at the Press Office I paid my bills, collected the official photographs and signed forms in triplicate. That night I took several sly shots of Baghdad after dark from my hotel balcony, then agonized for hours over whether anyone might have seen the flashes.

  Sunday afternoon left me with a couple of hours to spare before I had to catch my evening flight to Damascus, so I got my taxi-driver to stop off at the zoo. The pride of lions in their cramped cage looked anything but proud, their manes decidedly moth-eaten.   

The Bengal tiger wheezed as if it had been smoking 50 a day all its life. To an animal though, they were ignored by the few Iraqi visitors. They were all looking at me. The rarest live specimen in Baghdad Zoo is a tourist!

  Passing a compound of wild asses, I chanced upon a line of cages similar to those holding the big cats. Peering inside, I noticed the occupants cowering in the corners. They were dogs, ordinary domestic dogs. Now I’m not an expert on breeds, but in one cage there were a pair that looked like Spaniels and in another, some Terriers. 

  “What are these, Mahmood?”, I asked, turning to the taxi-driver. Mahmood looked suitably shame-faced. “They get well-fed and looked after in here”, he confessed, “ out on the street they get shot and eaten by the soldiers.”

  So there we have it then. If the fact that our sanctions have killed over 1.3 million Iraqi children doesn’t move us Brits to anger, then perhaps this will.

  For God’s sake stop the sanctions. For a society fit for dogs to live in!        

Although I considered that my writing for the magazines was going well, I never allowed myself to lose sight of the fact that my main aim was to publicise my books. At the end of each piece there would be a reference to either ‘Parkhurst Tales’ or another of my books.

  Purely from a financial perspective, the way the assignments were presently panning out I couldn’t have earned enough money to make it worth-while anyway. Each assignment was taking anything up to two weeks to research, plan and arrange all the logistics for. The trip itself would take from seven to ten days. Then it would take me a couple of days to write the story up from my notes. So it was highly unlikely that I could do more than one assignment per month. And as each assignment paid only about £1,000, there was definitely no long-term future in it.

  I had always been interested in politics and was an avid observer of the news. Looking around the world, there were literally scores, if not hundreds, of dangerous and interesting situations that would make for a good story. However, it was no use just going somewhere unless you had some kind of edge, some kind of contact. Furthermore, the magazine would want some evidence that you had a good chance of getting the story before they gave you a couple of thousand pounds in expenses.

  Iraq was a place that definitely interested me. Apart from the fact that we and the yanks were still bombing sporadically, there was an ongoing tragedy caused by the sanctions. Horrendous numbers of Iraqi children were dying for lack of basic food and medicine. If anyone else had been causing it, we would have raised it in the international arena at every opportunity. As it was there was just be the occasional, small article, quoting some United Nations report saying just how many kids were dying.

    Sanctions against Iraq, first by America and later by the United Nations, were imposed as early as May 1990. By August, the International Red Cross admitted that the sanctions, which prevented food and medicines from reaching the country, violated international law. In 1993, UNICEF estimated that between 80,000 and 100,000 children had died as a direct result of the sanctions. By 1997 the people of Iraq were poorer than those of Bangladesh. Presently, only the US and Britain were adamant that sanctions should still be applied.

  I had observed in prison just how callous and cruel the authorities could be, even to conniving at outright criminality. I did all I could to expose it in prison, which was precisely why they labeled me a trouble-maker. Now I had the opportunity to do the same outside.

  Further, a trip to Iraq would really put the cat amongst the pigeons regarding my right to travel abroad without Home Office permission. There was little doubt that they would notice I had been, probably long before I arrived too. I was sure the security services monitored all travel to and from Iraq. Bearing in mind I was doing an expose on the Government, it would be hypocritical in the extreme for them to pull me back into prison for breaching my life licence by traveling abroad without permission. But, as I was already well aware, the Home Office weren’t above hypocrisy.

  Now I had decided where I wanted to go, the next part was to work out how to get there. Apart from the fact that it was very difficult to physically travel to Iraq, I was aware that any journalist, or probably any non-Iraqi for that matter, couldn’t just go to the country without permission from the Iraqi government.

  I had read that George Galloway, MP, was one of the very few people who traveled regularly to Iraq. I spoke with his secretary and he gave me the telephone number of a Dr Amin, who was Head of the Iraqi Interests Section  which was located in Kensington.

  I wrote to Dr Amin explaining that I was an English journalist who wrote for men’s lifestyle magazines with circulations of anything up to one million. I pointed out that the British public were largely subjected  to the ‘American’ view of Iraq which, more often than not, was erroneous. I emphasised that I did not subscribe to that view. I went on to say that I had considerable sympathy for the plight of Iraqi children who were dying as a result of the sanctions and that it would be the object of my trip to publicise this to the full.

  I included my address, telephone number, passport number, National Union of Journalists card number and my e-mail address. I guessed they would do some checking. After all, being an Englishman whose Government was still in a virtual state of war with Iraq, I could well be a spy.

  I was in no doubt what the Iraqis did with spies, either. I had been friends with Tom Mangold, the noted TV journalist and Panorama presenter, for many years. I had rung him at the BBC to ask him his advice about Iraq. It was he who told me about Farzad Bazoft.

  On 17 August 1979, a huge explosion occurred 25 miles from Baghdad, which was clearly audible in the capital. For some, this confirmed that the Iraqi Government were carrying out nuclear research.

  The Observer sent one of its reporters, Iranian-born British national Farzad Bazoft to investigate. Accounts differ as to his agenda, some say he was on an intelligence mission gathering soil samples for Britain and therefore working indirectly for Israel. Others insist he was simply checking out a newsworthy story.

  Either way, after driving back from the scene of the explosion, Farzad was arrested on charges of spying and sentenced to death. Whilst in custody he confessed to spying for Israel, but the Iraqi security forces are well-known for torture. Everyone agrees that Farzad’s confession was forced out of him. 

  There was an international outcry at the sentence. Jordan’s King Hussein (one of Saddam’s best friends in the Arab world) sent a letter asking for clemency and our Foreign Secretary, Douglas Hurd, pleaded to come to Baghdad to discuss the matter.

  Saddam, however, insisted that Farzad must die and he was hanged on the 15 March 1990. His body was unceremoniously dumped in front of the British Embassy and Iraq’s Information Minister crowed, “Mrs Thatcher wanted Bazoft alive. We gave her the body.”

  The point wasn’t lost on me that pressure from a powerful newspaper like the Observer wasn’t enough to save Bazoft, neither was a letter from the King of Jordan. All I had on my side was ‘Front’ magazine, and perhaps a letter from the top-less model, Jordan.

  Then there was the problem of my Jewishness. Well it wasn’t a problem for me, but it certainly could be for Saddam. Quite prominently at the front of ‘Parkhurst Tales’ it stated that both my parents were Jewish. Now that doesn’t necessarily make me a member of Mossad, but it is just the sort of thing that could make a man like Saddam suspicious. Clearly, I would have to tread very carefully.

  Anyway, it was all largely academic at the moment. I sent the letter off, thinking that  would probably be the last I heard of Iraq. You can imagine my surprise when, a couple of days later, I got a letter from Dr Amin inviting me for an interview at the Iraqi Bureau in Kensington.

  The rest was remarkably straightforward. I talked with Dr Amin for about 20 minutes, then filled out several forms with a young lady in reception. I was told that I would be informed of their decision in due course. To be frank, I still thought that was the end of it, but, about a month later, I suddenly received a letter instructing me to come to the Bureau and pick up my visa. 

  I quickly found a travel agent in the Edgeware Road  who arranged trips to Iraq. There were two ways to go. I could either fly to Jordan, then make a two day drive across the desert. Or I could fly to Damascus in neighbouring Syria and catch one of the two flights each week to Baghdad. This was the only plane that actually flew into Iraq and, as such, was highly symbolic. The Americans and the British were both imposing no-fly zones and cynics wouldn’t have put it past either of them to bring the plane down ‘by accident’. Then there were all Saddam’s internal and external dissidents, who would most certainly have liked to bring it down.

  However, I really didn’t fancy the two-day drive across the desert. I guessed it would be arduous, quite expensive and rather hit and miss. I wanted to make sure that I got to Baghdad. With the Damascus plane, at least it was a direct flight.

  I had a couple more vaccinations at BAs Regent Street clinic, against diseases even the Colombians hadn’t heard off. Then I went directly to ‘Front’s offices for a last minute briefing with Eoin. 

  We discussed what he should do in case I got into trouble out there. There was no conversation, just 30 seconds of dead silence. Neither of us could think of anything at all worthwhile. As an afterthought I asked that he keep Marsha informed. 

  Just as I was leaving he suddenly came over all thoughtful and looked slightly embarrassed. I had to drag it out of him. He confessed that whilst he thought it was a great assignment and highly dangerous to boot, the subject of thousands of dead kids was a bit dark for a lifestyle magazine. The upshot was a polite request for me to try to make it a bit funny!

  Now I knew Saddam had been accused of many things, but I was sure he had never been accused of being funny. However, I did take the point. I would write the piece with a strong sense of the ironic, which is about as funny as it gets in Iraq. Here’s the piece:- 

  No one was more surprised than I, when I finally received my visa for Iraq. Except perhaps the lady at the Iraqi bureau who had taken my original application about a month previously.

  “Have you been in touch with Baghdad”, she queried? Now how would I? It’s almost impossible to get through by phone and the only person I know there is Saddam, and we’re not speaking at the moment.

  I had already read extensively about Iraq, but, in search of further information, I rang my old pal, Tom, at the BBC. Tom had been everywhere and seen virtually everything.

  “Don’t drink the water, even the bottled stuff and be very careful”, Tom barked, “they’re a vicious bunch of bastards. Not the ordinary people. They’re nice, like ordinary people everywhere. But Saddam’s secret police are totally ruthless and quite evil.”

  “But I’m a journalist, Tom”, I replied smugly. “So was Farzad Bazoft of the Observer”, retorted Tom, “ and they hanged him for spying.” Gee thanks, Tom , that’s really put my mind at rest.

  While the Syrian Airlines plane was delayed for 90 minutes on the runway at Heathrow, the stewardesses brought round glasses of cool mineral water. It was only later that I saw the Arabic writing on the water bottles. Six hours later, whilst sitting in Damascus airport waiting for my connecting flight to Baghdad, I felt my stomach start to bubble.

  Well aware of the British and US-enforced no-fly zones over most of Iraq, and conscious that this recently resumed flight was the only one operating in Iraqi airspace, I was already understandably concerned. The three very thorough baggage searches and my personal identification of my bag on the tarmac further alerted me to the very real possibility of a terrorist threat.

  As the only European on board, I surreptitiously examined my fellow passengers. Wild-looking, hook-nosed Arabs in flowing robes sat cheek-by-jowl with old, female, Iranian pilgrims in black chadors, only their eyes visible. It did occur to me that I was the only one who didn’t look like a potential terrorist. I was sure that just one ‘Allah Akhbar’ out of any of them would be enough to ensure instant cardiac arrest.

  It wasn’t long in coming. As we taxied for take-off a guttural voice called out from the rear. Immediately, the Iranian pilgrims answered in chorus. It was okay, they were only praying for a safe flight. But considering the dodgy state of my bowels, they might have warned me.

  Saddam International Airport looked just as dilapidated as you would expect after standing idle for over ten years, all the clocks eternally frozen at 12.33. The arrivals board still bore legends of exotic destinations like Berlin and Bucharest, but now there were only these two flights a week from Damascus.

  All the streets were deserted as we drove through the darkness to the hotel. To my enquiry about where all the people were, the taxi driver mimed that they were all asleep. How clever of Saddam to synchronise all Iraqi body-clocks so that everybody falls asleep at the same time!

  The Melia-Mansur Hotel had once been five-star and the second best in Baghdad. It was still second best, but ‘second best’ is a comparative term. The expression ‘faded grandeur’ sprang to mind as I was shown to my room. Worn, holed carpets lined the corridor floors, stained wallpaper peeled from the walls, but I was past caring. My body longed for sleep, my bowels for a speedy encounter with a toilet.

  In my room I triumphed in a brief skirmish with cockroaches, but baulked at washing my hands in the dark, brown water that ran from the taps. The final horror was soon to be revealed – no toilet roll!

  That night I thrashed in the throes of fever. With my bed-sheets soaked in sweat I alternated between burning up and shivering with cold. I feared something serious. Could I have contracted one of those terrible tropical diseases you read about? I muttered a silent prayer, “please don’t let my dick shrivel and drop off”.

  With Monday morning came my appointment with the Press Office. This would be crucial. They would decide what I could and could not do and I was determined to make a good impression on them. Not easy when half my concentration was on the whereabouts of the nearest toilet and how long it would take me to get there.

  A five-minute walk took me to a shabby office block where the Press Office was located. I found my way to the director’s office, where he sat with several colleagues. Stern faces, beards, moustaches and designer stubble were much in evidence. Supremely conscious of the fact they probably viewed me as, at best, the enemy and, at worst, a spy, I launched into my carefully prepared speech.

  “I know all about America’s role in undermining Iraq”, I thundered, leaning forward for effect. “How they built you up as a counterbalance to the Shah of Iran, then, when Ayatollah Khomeni came to power in 1979, encouraged you to attack. Then, quite cynically, the Americans armed both sides until eight years of war had ruined both countries. Finally, with Iraq in dire straits, they got Kuwait to increase its oil production, further damaging the Iraqi economy. That was why you had to attack Kuwait.”

  I sat back quite pleased with myself and carefully examined their faces. It was hard to gauge their reactions, what with the cultural differences and all. However, I was sure I saw thougthfulness, grudging respect, admiration even. Not a bit of it. The director explained in fractured English that none of them spoke much English, so could I repeat myself to Mohammed, who was in the next office and was fluent. 

  Mohammed, another moustache-and-stubble guy, asked me for my proposed schedule. I listed:- an interview with Saddam’s sons, Uday and Qusay; a trip to Tikrit, Saddam’s birthplace; a tour of the bunker at Amirayah which was hit by US missiles in 1991 and evidence of the improved standing of Iraqi women, specifically, their fighting roles in the armed forces. A few photos of foreign women with guns always went down well in ‘Front’. 

  Mohammed said that he would forward my requests to a higher authority and told me to come back tomorrow.

  As I left the Press Office I had my first real confrontation – with the weather. To say that it was like walking into an oven doesn’t do it justice. The heat was like a wall that slowed all movement to a crawl. When the wind blew it was worse, because the wind was hot as well. Our hottest days in England rarely reach 27 degrees Celsius; here the temperature gauge regularly showed above 50. I slow-walked to the sanctuary of my air-conditioned room.    

part 2 will follow shortly

  Roy James never had any need to become a criminal. He was a talented racing driver with the famous Brabham team and his future looked bright. Yet Roy liked to cock a snook at authority. Ergo his role in the ‘Train Robbery’. He was sentenced to 30 years in 1964.

  After his release in 1976, he tried to resurrect his racing career, but crashed the second time out. He then turned his hand to gold smuggling with Charlie Wilson and was subsequently cleared of a £2.5 million V.A.T. fraud in 1984.

  Shortly afterwards, Roy married Anthea, 30 years his junior and a bank manager’s daughter, who worked in Roy’s Hatton Garden jewelers shop. By 1994 they were separated and arguing bitterly over their two children, who Roy had custody of. The two main bones of contention were Anthea’s drink problem and a dispute over the divorce settlement. 

  One weekend, Anthea had an access visit with her daughters. Later, she returned them to Roy’s house, accompanied by her father. Soon a particularly acrimonious argument broke out. Roy snapped. He fetched a handgun from the house and shot Anthea’s father three times in the shoulder. He then beat Anthea with the gun.

  At his trail he blamed the pressure of the ‘Train Robbery’ and its aftermath for his mental condition, claiming that it had ruined his life. The trial judge accepted that he was suffering from a depressive mental illness and sentenced him to a comparatively merciful six years imprisonment.

  Whilst in prison he constantly complained that he felt ill. The prison authorities, as is their wont, accused him of malingering. Eventually they allowed him to go to an outside hospital for tests. The hospital kept him in, saying that he had a serious heart condition that required immediate surgery. They operated the same day and saved his life.

  Over the following months his health went from strength to strength and he was eventually released with no obvious ill effects. However, Roy felt a deep sense of gratitude to the two German doctors who had saved his life. So when they informed him that they were conducting a series of tests that would benefit future heart patients and needed ten human guinea pigs, Roy felt obliged to help. 

  Students of bad jokes will have seen this coming. Two German doctors and ten human guinea pigs?  You’ve got it. Roy died during the tests!

  To those who knew him, Buster Edward’s story is really sad. Of all the ‘Robbers’, Buster had the most likeable personality. He was a shy and private man who, other than for a small group of friends, kept himself to himself. You had nothing to fear from Buster.

  Generous and loyal to a fault, he would do anything to help a friend out. The irony is that so-called friends bled him of his share of the money whilst on the run. Buster didn’t have a nasty bone in his body and abhorred violence, so he couldn’t do a lot about it. Nearly penniless and with the pressure of life on the run becoming too much for him, he gave himself up in 1967 for a lesser sentence of 15 years. All he wanted was to be with his wife, June.

  Although formerly enormously fat, Buster had a very determined nature. In prison he became a fitness fanatic, training for several hours every day. I trained regularly with him and, although ten years his junior and very fit myself, often struggled to keep up.

  Buster was released in April 1975 and immediately began to struggle to survive. Being an ex-‘Train Robber’ precluded him from most types of employment and he got little or no help from former friends. Within months he was arrested and convicted of petty shop-lifting, in Harrods of all places. This was widely interpreted as a cry for help. Unfortunately no one was listening. 

  He then ran a flower stall outside Waterloo Station where he became something of a local landmark. I used to see him nearly every day as I crossed the Waterloo Bridge to visit my girlfriend in North London. Often I would stop and talk for a while.

  Fresh out of jail myself, Buster warned me that it wasn’t like the old days. Then, ‘the chaps’ used to rally round and help out a fellow ‘face’. He complained bitterly that no one had helped him. To add insult to injury, a film purporting to be of his life was made, starring Phil Collins. Nobody asked his permission or otherwise consulted him and he was given a derisory £5,000. 

  Although on the surface he seemed his usual, cheerful self, in private he became increasingly depressed. There was a lock-up garage behind Waterloo Station where he used to keep his flower stall. One day he got drunk, went into the lock-up and hanged himself.

  Tommy Wisbey was a trier, there can be no doubt about that. Despite almost criminal bad luck, he had pursued a thief’s life for over three decades. For his part in the ‘Train Robbery’ he was sentenced to 30 years in 1964. The bad news then piled up very fast. Barely two years later, one of his daughters was killed in a car crash.

  Then he lost all his money that he had left in the safe-keeping of ‘friends’. In 1967, one of his few remaining friends, tried to retrieve it for him. Jackie ‘Scotch Jack’ Buggie, gangster and sometime lover of Shirley Bassey, confronted a well-known London criminal in a night club. In front of several witnesses, Buggie was shot to death, wrapped in a carpet and dumped at sea. Almost immediately it was disturbed by a mine-sweeper and found by two off-duty policemen out fishing. However, investigating officers were bribed, witnesses intimidated and no one was ever charged with the murder.

  Wisbey was eventually released in 1974. In 1982 he was involved in another train robbery, but this time on a much smaller scale (so much for the deterrent effect of the 30 year sentence). Together with as many as nineteen others, they would travel as passengers and let themselves into locked, high value coaches with specially-made keys. Then they would throw the mailbags off the train to be collected by others waiting at the track-side. Over one million pounds-worth of travelers cheques went missing at the hands of the gang. All they could pin on Wisbey though was a ‘handling’ charge and he was fined £500.

  In 1989, after an extensive surveillance operation, he and another ‘train robber’, Jimmy Hussey, were arrested in a drugs conspiracy. They were convicted of being in possession of 2.5 kilos of cocaine and one kilo of cocaine respectively.  Wisbey was sentenced to ten years; Hussey to seven.

  Several other ‘train robbers’ were touched by ‘the curse’, but in less spectacular ways. Following a bungled knee operation in prison, Bobby Welch was left permanently crippled. After years of pain he finally had a leg amputated. Bruce Reynolds lost something far more dear to him whilst in prison, his share of the loot. Poverty-stricken, on release he tried his hand at drugs dealing and was caught in possession of £5,000 worth of amphetamine and sentenced to three years.  

  William Boal wasn’t even on the robbery, although he did sit in on some of the earlier planning meetings. Some ‘creative investigating’ on the part of the police saw a watch with traces of paint from Leatherslade Farm planted on him. He was sentenced to 18 years and died in prison of a brain tumour.

  Which just leaves Ronnie Biggs. Popular mythology has it that Ronnie is the only ‘lucky’ robber, leading an idyllic life on the run after escaping from prison only one year into a 25-year sentence, imposed in 1964. So has he been untouched by ‘the curse’? 

  In 1997 I was commissioned to work as a consultant on a ‘Secret History’ of the ‘Great Train Robbery’ for Channel Four. Together with a camera crew I flew to Rio where Ronnie had been avoiding extradition for 33 years. With me was an old friend of Ronnie’s, Freddie Foreman, former member of the Kray Gang.

  We met Ronnie in his basement flat in a run-down area of Rio that had seen better days. His reunion with Fred was emotional. The talk was all of hiding out in Fred’s Auntie Nell’s flat, with a suitcase full of money hidden behind the sofa.

  Ronnie looked well for a man of seventy, especially considering the stroke he had had the previous year. At the sight of the camera crew he seemed to come alive. Like the old trooper that he is, he launched into the well-rehearsed routine that has stood him in good stead through countless similar interviews over the years.

  Later I pulled him aside and asked him about ‘the curse’ and we went through his life since the escape. He had lost most of his money through friends who had betrayed him. Then there was the pressure of life on the run in Australia with his wife, Charmaine, and their three children. When the police caught up with him he had fled to Brazil, leaving his family behind. His oldest boy was subsequently killed in a car crash and Ronnie didn’t  hear about it for nine months. 

  He had been arrested in Brazil and subjected to lengthy extradition proceedings. His marriage to his Brazilian wife, Raimunda, had saved him. He was allowed to stay, but had to eke out a living giving interviews and working as a tour guide. Life had been one long struggle to survive. In 1981 he had been kidnapped to Barbados by an English adventurer, but the courts rejected the illegal nature of his capture and returned him to Brazil. Then his wife, eleven years his junior, had died suddenly. Not exactly a blissful existence in paradise at all.

  Ron was adamant though. “I adopted Brazil as my country and I’ve taken the good with the bad over the last 33 years”, he said, as I leafed through newspaper cuttings showing Ron lying by the pool, drinking beer and surrounded by local beauties. It had all been largely a creation by the media though.

  On the positive side, he introduced me to his Brazilian son, a fine-looking young man and former pop-star in some of the good days. The family Rottweiler played by the pool between two parrots in cages. I mused that perhaps life hadn’t been too bad in the circumstances. Brazil had been more than some vast open prison for him.

  All at once the camera crew were ready again. Ron climbed wearily to his feet, a resigned look on his face. “What a way to have to earn a living”, he said. Suddenly it came to me. Perhaps this was driver Mills’ curse on Ronnie Biggs.

  However, there was one final indignity to come. Seriously ill and in need of a crucial operation that he didn‘t have the money to pay for, Ronnie agreed to come back to England and give himself up. Somehow, ‘The Sun’ newspaper had got in on the act. They enlisted the aid of Bruce Reynolds to travel to Brazil and come back with Ron. He was paid a large sum for his help.

  Ron duly arrived in England, wearing a white t-shirt with ‘The Sun’ emblazoned on it. One could only reflect on the old man’s state of mind that he had allowed himself to be talked into such a media circus. Further, those of us with experience of the Home Office, knew that they would want their pound of flesh. Old and ill, or not, they would want to make an example of Ronnie for all the years he had got away with it. There would be no mercy on their part.

  Located in the top security Belmarsh prison with international terrorists and major drug dealers, Ron finally had his operation. It left him unable to speak and partially crippled. His ever-dutiful son constantly petitions the Home Office for his release on compassionate grounds, but compassion is in short supply where Ronnie is concerned. 

  So still serving his 30-year sentence for a crime committed over 40 years ago, he sits mute and waiting for death in a top security prison. Surely, this is driver Mills’ curse on Ronnie Biggs.   

Although the FARC story was my first real journalistic assignment, I had written an article for ‘Loaded’ before. It was a crime story and, in view of my background, I was obviously trying to play from a position of strength. However, I didn’t intend to concentrate solely on crime because I knew it to be something subject to the law of diminishing returns. For a start, the vast majority of criminals looked on the average journalist as nothing but a ‘grass’, a police informer. Many a criminal had had expose articles written about him and had been arrested as a result. And for a story to have any worth, one had to break new ground, reveal new facts. Once it became known that I was a crime journalist, less and less people would confide in me. So there would be no new facts to reveal and so, no story of worth.

  This particular crime story though would reveal previously unknown facts without compromising anyone. Further, in view of the fact that so many of the leading characters had walked in and out of my life over the past thirty years, it was quite a personal story, even though the crime at its centre was so well known as to be almost public property.

  The ‘Great Train Robbery’ is probably Britain’s most famous crime. When a gang of men stopped the Glasgow to Euston mail train in the early hours of the 8^th of August 1963 and robbed it of £2,500,000 in cash it took its place in the history books as a unique case.

  A brief examination of contemporary British crime reveals a phenomenon that was, to paraphrase Rousseau, ‘nasty, brutish and short’. It was inevitably characterized by a minimum of planning and a maximum of violence. The prolific and highly successful Bertie Smalls bank robbery gang even made a joke of it, calling themselves ‘the Crash, Bang, Wallop Gang’.

  ‘The Train’ was different though. Upwards of fifteen men were involved in a highly detailed plan that was put together over several months. Trains were timed, signals examined, escape routes planned and transport for the loot and a hide-out were bought.

  The gang itself was something of a contradiction. Only a few of those caught (rumour has it that three got away) had experience of major, violent crime. The rest were a mixture of lesser criminals, minor criminals and even a couple of ‘straight goers’.

  The actual robbery went well enough. Inside information had informed the gang that this particular load was worth taking. Communicating with walkie-talkies, the gang fixed a signal and stopped the train in a desolate part of Buckinghamshire in the early hours.

  The ‘high value’ coach was uncoupled from the rest of the train and shunted further up the track. The robbers then smashed their way in and intimidated the Post Office sorting staff working inside. Then they formed a human chain to pass the 120 mail bags full with cash down the embankment. These were loaded into the backs of two Land Rovers and a lorry, which were then driven the twenty miles or so to Leatherslade Farm, the robbers’ hide-out. The robbery itself had taken just 35 minutes and they had stolen £2, 631,684, approximately £20 million at today’s values. 

  There was only one hitch. One of the robbers coshed train driver Mills. Mills recovered, but he never worked again. The 25 guineas he received from British Rail and the £250 from the Post Office could hardly have been much consolation to him. Most of the robbers’ loot was never recovered. 

  Mills died seven years later of bronchial pneumonia, chronic bronchitis and lymphatic leukaemia. At the inquest Leonard Curley, the Home Office pathologist, emphasised that, in his opinion, there was nothing to connect the assault with his death. However, both his wife and son said that Mills was never the same man again, and many of the public certainly felt that the experience hastened his death.

  This far is all pretty much common knowledge. As is the fact that most of the robbers were caught and sentenced to very long terms in jail. What isn’t widely known however is the almost incredible catalogue of disaster and misfortune that has dogged many of them. It is almost as if they were cursed by the death of driver Mills.

  It was late August in 1963 and although I was aware of the ‘Great Train Robbery’ my failing romance was totally at the centre of my concentration. It was a strange relationship by any standards, she, a fascist who’s brothers were personal bodyguards to Sir Oswald Mosely and me the son of Jewish parents. They had even prevailed upon me to look after guns they used for armed robberies. It had a predictable end. 

  Mad with jealousy over her latest infidelity I confronted Susan in he parent’s flat. Raging, she fetched the gun she used to keep under her pillow. Fortunately, her best friend Josephine was a witness to all this. The single shot came from the pistol I had been carrying.

  Murder with a firearm was then a capital offence. The following morning I sat in a cell at Marylebone Magistrates Court, waiting to answer just that charge. My parents were both law-abiding folk and knew nothing of courts and procedures. My legal representation had been arranged by a friend who’s father had done several terms inside. As a result, through my door walked Brian Field, solicitor’s clerk to John Denbigh Wheater. They would help me prepare my defence for my trial at the Old Bailey.

  Or, at least, that had been the plan. You can imagine my consternation when, a few weeks later, both Wheater and Field were arrested and charged over the ‘Great Train Robbery’.

  In the event I was sentenced to six years for manslaughter and was sent to Wormwood Scrubs, where John Wheater became my library orderly and Brian Field my bridge partner. The latter experience was definitely part of the punishment. You learn an awful lot about a man when he is your bridge partner. Fortunately it didn’t last.

  On the face of it Brian Field was just a solicitors clerk, but in realty he was a whole lot more than that. He had acted for Gordon Goody, also arrested for ‘The Train’, and other professional criminals in the past. In time, he had come to occupy that twilight world that sometimes exists between ‘straight people’ and the criminal fraternity. ‘The Train’ was his ‘bit of work’. He had put up ‘bits of work’ in the past.

  From a professional criminals perspective, the trouble with Brian was that he thought it was all part of some jolly game. With his posh accent and his ‘hail fellow well met’ persona he was what criminals call a ‘silly bollocks’. Violent crime is a brutal, dirty business and it was very apparent to everyone that, if things got nasty, Brian wouldn’t have either the strength or the stomach to cope.

  The 25-year sentence he received for his part in ‘The Train’ brought him right down to earth with a bump. Fortunately for him, before he could really come to terms with the enormity of the sentence it was reduced on appeal to five years. The Appeal Court decided that he had only been party to buying the farm as a hide-out and not to the planning of the actual robbery.

  Brian served just over three years and the only hardship that befell him, apart from losing me as a bridge partner that is, was that his wife divorced him. On release he changed his name and started a new life.

  By 1997 he had been free for ten years and was now a successful sales manager for an international publishing company. He had a pretty new wife, a Porshe, a nice flat in a select area and was flush with money. It seemed that he had put his past behind him and successfully re-invented himself.

  One weekend, he and his wife were driving home along the M4 in the Porsche after a short break in the country. Traveling in the opposite direction was a Mercedes carrying the daughter of Paul Raymond, her husband and their two children. The husband was driving . He had been drinking.

  Suddenly , the Mercedes swerved and hit the central barrier. It hit at precisely the spot where the barrier had been bent downwards in an earlier collision.

  The Mercedes took off like a water-skier off a ramp. It hurtled through the air, turned upside down as it crossed the central reservation and, in a million to one accident, landed right on top of the oncoming Porsche. Brian Field, his wife and the four occupants of the Mercedes were all killed.

  I too was released from prison in 1967, but unlike Brian Field I neither changed my name nor my way of life. Once again, the ending was predictable. In 1970 I was sentenced to life imprisonment for killing another criminal.

   In the 24 years I spent in the system I met many thousands of notorious and violent criminals. I also met many of the ‘train robbers’ and, by comparison, they were nice guys. There was nothing vicious or nasty about any of them. And to those who would say, “Ah, except that is the violent and nasty crime they were convicted of”, I would answer that, for their sins, they were sentenced to phenomenally long terms.  

  Charlie Wilson was a nice guy, virtually nobody had a bad word to say about him, except perhaps the workers on the train he robbed. Charlie was a handsome-looking man, had a fine physique and possessed a personality full of wit and intelligence. I knew him through some of the darkest days of his 30-year sentence and never once saw him  miserable or depressed.

  Charlie was undoubtedly one of the most professional of the robbers, having previously been involved in the ‘London Airport Robbery’ when an audacious gang of ten men stole £62,000. If that doesn’t sound much by today’s values you must remember that you could by a large, London house for about £5,000 then.

  He was amongst the first arrested for the ‘Train Robbery’ and was sentenced to 30 years in 1964. But within a year he had escaped from Winson Green Prison and fled to Canada. However, he was arrested there three years later and returned to England. He didn’t walk free again until 1978.

  After his release, Charlie made a lot of money as a gold smuggler. Together with others he imported millions of pounds worth of gold coins, melted them down and sold the gold as ingots, so avoiding paying V.A.T. In 1984 he was arrested for a £2.5 million V.A.T. fraud, but the charges were dropped for lack of evidence.

  The following year he and another man were arrested for conspiracy to rob a security van whilst in possession of two shotguns. After four months on remand the charges were dropped and two Detective Constables involved in the case were charged with conspiracy to rob and conspiracy to pervert the course of justice. A serious attempt had been made to frame Charlie.

  In 1987 Charlie went to live in Spain. Perhaps he thought that it would be a case of ‘out of sight, out of mind’. However a serious threat emerged from a completely different source. Early in 1990 he offended a powerful, Holland-based drugs gang boss called Roy Adkins, after a friend of Charlie’s mentioned Adkins name in a court case. Some remarks Charlie had made about the case got back to Adkins.

  Adkins was definitely not a man to cross. He had grown increasingly wealthy and powerful of late. With it had come the paranoia and he had ordered the deaths of several men. In April Adkins sent two hit-men to visit Charlie at his Spanish villa. Charlie was shot to death!