Urban Smuggler
Her Majesty's Customs Cocaine & Coconuts...
Urban Smuggler has all the elements of a Hollywood crime movie: gangsters, guns, girls, tons of money and half a ton of cocaine, enough to keep London's clubland snorting for months, and hanging over the entire story is a poisonous cloud of suspicion.
But this story isn't fiction; it's fact. The mean streets aren't in
Harlem; they're in Hackney. And the lawmen aren't FBI agents; they're
British Customs officers. |
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This is the story of how one of UK Customs' greatest triumphs turned
into one of its biggest disasters and exposed something flawed at the
heart of one of the world's most respected crime forces. This is the
story of cocaine and coconuts.
The dramatic story reveals Customs officers spying on their
colleagues. It exposes dangerous leaks and illicit dissemination of
secret documents on a huge scale. The questions that hang over the
whole Customs organisation paint a picture of betrayal, incompetence,
mismanagement and perhaps corruption in Her Majesty's frontline force
against drugs - on a previously unimaginable scale.
In a case which is replete with claim and counter-claim, one fact
that is undisputed is that top-secret and incredibly sensitive Customs
documents found their way into the hands of the criminal fraternity -
indeed, into the country's prisons and, spectacularly, under
defendants' cell doors. How this happened remains a mystery but must
have involved a chain of events that is startling in its scale.
Urban Smuggler is not just the story of one drugs bust, however
sensational. Andrew Pritchard has led an extraordinary life. His
story encompasses the reality of mass immigration from the West Indiesinto deprived post-war London in the 1950s. As a 21 year old, he was
running illegal acid-house parties, such as Genesis events. Later, he
went legitimate and staged the 1999 Sunsplash festival in Victoria
Park.
This attracted 40,000 revellers to hear A-list artists,
including Wyclef Jean. He was a magnet for the stars of urban black
music, and Mel B of the Spice Girls attended the event as his guest,
as did countless other artists from the UK, USA and Caribbean.
From start to finish, Pritchard's tale is, without exaggeration, 'stranger than fiction'.
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