The New Spymasters Read online

  This was just the beginning of more than two decades of life as a gangster, punctuated by spells in prison and efforts by Savery, who remained in touch, to keep him out. At different times, Antoniades ran two casinos in London, was involved in multiple shootings and stabbings, and fought street battles with, among others, infamous gangland rivals Charlie and Reggie Kray. He tried to fix horse races, staged a diamond robbery in Antwerp, staged another robbery in Greece (where he also foiled an assassination attempt) and smuggled cigarettes to Italy and Spain, where he was arrested and jailed again.

  Antoniades’s reputation as Keravnos always both dogged and elevated him. Cypriots in London at first spread the word that he was a grass. When challenged, he would respond with violence. ‘When you know two or three fat bastards are wandering around Soho saying, “Andrew is an informant, Andrew is this and that”, then – fuck off – then I had to put them right, these people. I had to fight.’ He talked with ease of glassing someone with an ashtray, stabbing another with a knife that broke inside the man’s arm, beating up someone ‘very badly’. Always making money; always losing it.

  There were many, many criminal adventures. Things came to a head in the early 1980s in Spain, with Antoniades in jail once more and his old friend Savery again giving evidence in court about his good character. ‘We were close friends. He knows I love him and he loves me,’ recalled Antoniades. When Savery was out in Spain, they got chatting and a new idea took shape. It so happened that among his different criminal escapades, Antoniades had never been involved in drug trafficking; meeting heroin addicts in hospital had turned him against it, he claimed. Now Savery devised a plan using Antoniades’s criminal reputation as a front for an undercover role fighting the drugs trade, and in particular the Turkish-Kurdish gangs then taking over the supply of heroin into Britain.

  It was the start of Antoniades’s second career as a spy. ‘I said if I come to London I can kill these fucking Turkish. I know them and they listen to me.’ There was one problem: he had too many enemies back in England. But, he said, Savery told him he could be protected. ‘If you help us, somebody will help you.’ He brought out to Spain a senior officer from customs who made the arrangements.

  * * *

  The game began the day he returned to London. He was sitting in a restaurant in Streatham, south London, with a customs officer. As he remembered it, someone recognized him.

  ‘Welcome, Keravnos. How are you?’

  ‘Good.’

  ‘I’ve some people here from Liverpool. They want to do some business.’

  The people were drug dealers, who told them of a Pakistani who wanted to sell fifty kilos of heroin.

  ‘I said if it’s good, we accept,’ recalled Antoniades.

  The very next day he was led to the Pakistani’s house and found the drugs, which were then all seized by customs.

  From then on, and for the next twenty years, he was registered as an official informant, initially under the code name Mario. ‘I did a couple of hundred jobs for customs. I did it because I hate heroin.’ He was also paid a lot of money.

  His method of working was to make people believe that he was a ready buyer for their drugs. He played on his reputation as the untouchable and on his years spent in the underworld. Who would believe he was playing for the other side?

  A Pakistani barrister once approached him via a friend and said, ‘I’ve got some heroin arriving. Can you sell it?’

  Antoniades replied, ‘No problem. That’s my business.’

  The heroin was due to arrive at Heathrow Airport in two days. Antoniades went to the airport on the appointed day with the barrister and they waited in a nearby hotel. The barrister told him that his friend – a steward on an incoming Pakistan Airlines flight – would call them when he got through immigration and customs controls with the drugs ‘and we will collect it’.

  Meanwhile, Antoniades had passed on the flight number and the name of the steward to Nick Baker, a senior customs officer who had become his handler. Antoniades recalled that Baker had taken thirty or forty customs officers and surrounded the plane. They searched the PIA plane and found no heroin or anything illegal. The steward himself was also questioned and searched, but had to be released. After a few hours of this fruitless search, Baker phoned and said, ‘Andrew, we look stupid.’ But Antoniades replied, ‘It’s not possible. The man is with me.’

  He spoke to the barrister and asked him to call his friend, the steward, and find out the reason for the hold-up. ‘He rang and the man said, “I already am in the hotel in room 346.”’

  No one ever explained how the heroin had made it through the customs net – one possibility was that it had been smuggled in catering trollies. But it had now reached the hotel and the steward said to come and collect it. Antoniades went to the toilet in the hotel room and, from there, called Baker on his mobile phone to tell him it was in room 346.

  Customs officers rushed over and raided the room and found a Pakistani – and the heroin. Meanwhile, the barrister had told Antoniades, ‘Let’s go and get it.’ But when they got to the hotel door they looked through and saw a young Pakistani man in handcuffs. Antoniades explained, ‘We said, “Oh, my God, let’s run away.” So we left. He didn’t suspect me because I’m good at acting.’

  There were numerous other cases. Antoniades reeled them off, even though his memory played tricks with some of the details: two tonnes of hashish seized in Canada via a tip-off to the US Drug Enforcement Agency; fifty kilos of heroin found in Streatham; more in Brixton; a big haul in Maida Vale; twenty kilos in a BMW at Dover; the time when he was sent by customs to pretend to buy drugs in Germany; and an operation in Liverpool when many kilos of heroin were concealed inside steel tubes. It was an impressive list and one that some of his former handlers in customs confirmed in outline, even if, because of their enduring duty to protect a source, they refused to discuss which exact cases he was involved with.

  But there was another view of this work, a suggestion that he was cheating and dealing in drugs, among other things, himself. Just as a spy among terrorists might be tempted to get involved in operations to maintain his credibility and survive, so a spy among criminals might want to keep his hand in crime. But, whether a spy worked among terrorists or ordinary criminals, no spy handler had a licence to turn a blind eye to such conduct.

  I had first heard the names Antoniades and Keravnos from the police. In the late 1990s, when I was writing about crime for the Sunday Times, certain policemen said they were convinced that he and some of the biggest drug dealers in Britain were getting extraordinary protection from Her Majesty’s Customs & Excise.9 They felt informants such as Antoniades were using their connections with law enforcement to cover their back, earn cash or eliminate the opposition, even as they continued their own life of crime. It was well known that drug dealers often informed on their rivals. Years before, one of the country’s top customs officers had told me, ‘There is no major drug dealer who isn’t an informant.’ But suggesting that these informants thereby got protection was another matter and much more serious.

  It was not necessarily an outlandish idea. In the US, it eventually became clear that James ‘Whitey’ Bulger, a gangster who for decades from 1975 had served as an FBI informer, had used his protected informant status – passing on information about rival gangs – to get away with at least eleven murders. More than twelve FBI agents were found to have broken the rules in handling him, a federal judge ruled.10

  Detective Inspector John Collins, a streetwise policeman of thirty years, was one of the critics. He had become convinced that some informants were not only receiving protection but also being allowed to commit crimes, including murder. He led a twelve-man drugs squad in north London in the 1990s and in one year they seized more than 100 kilos of heroin. With the help of authorized wire taps, he listened to the private conversations of some of the capital’s biggest gangsters. However, as his small unit tried to move against the major players, he felt hidden resistance.


  Collins was an expert on the police use of human intelligence against the underworld. His skill was reading people generally and the criminal mind in particular. I used to credit him with having the sort of X-ray spectacles once advertised in comic books. Walk on the street with him and he would casually point out a criminal team that might be mingling among the crowds, selling drugs or pickpocketing. He saw what normal people did not see.

  Perhaps it was his background. Before becoming a policeman, he had been a taxi driver in south London and had grown up knowing the local gangs. In those days, part of the job of a taxi driver was to deliver bungs (bags of cash) to policemen in pubs. Once a policeman himself, Collins never worked the streets south of the river in London. He was too well known.

  In 1999, after twenty-six years on the street, Collins started working at the National Criminal Intelligence Service (NCIS), an agency founded in 1992 to bring together the different crime-fighting agencies. It was located just across the railway track from the headquarters of SIS at Vauxhall Bridge. Collins was part of a special unit that gathered intelligence on heroin trafficking.

  As the fight against top-level criminals became more organized in the 1990s, police and customs had created a shared computer system that NCIS hosted. When someone became a target for investigation by one unit, he was ‘flagged’ in that system so as to prevent another unit from pursuing the same target and spoiling the investigation. If a Mr Big was under long-term customs surveillance, for instance, with the objective of tracing his suppliers, it could wreck years of work if a police unit charged clumsily in and arrested him for a smaller offence.

  With access now to more restricted information flows, Collins noticed that gangsters like Antoniades were being flagged for years in the computer as under active investigation by customs, but no criminal charges were ever brought against them. Collins would not comment on the specific intelligence files, but speaking in general he recalled it was apparent that some people labelled as major dealers were ‘not worked on’ by any investigating team. He said, ‘You could draw the file out and see very quickly the guy was an informant. If the current intelligence is that the guy is a drug dealer in north London and [the file] didn’t show me that they were being worked on, then it became obvious it was a false flag.’

  Surely such false flags were a legitimate device to protect an informant?

  ‘You won’t get informants unless you protect them,’ he agreed. But Antoniades and two others were the top ‘three criminals who were running the drugs trade and had ownership of 80 per cent of the drugs trade in the UK at the time. If you protect those people to get information about the guys who are dealing with a kilo, it really doesn’t make the system work.’

  I had approached Collins for a comment after having been shown reports filed by NCIS that labelled Antoniades as a major dealer. One said he was ‘suspected of being involved in organizing large shipments of heroin being imported into the UK by various methods’. Another said, ‘This target arranges the importation and subsequent delivery of heroin across NE London.’

  Interviewed after his retirement, Antoniades’s former handler, Nick Baker, said the reports were false. They had been placed there on the computer – with the knowledge of Collins’s boss at NCIS – as a smokescreen to protect an informer. As Antoniades himself said, ‘Sometimes they put in the computer I am a dangerous drug dealer because they know some people are going to check.’ Baker said that Collins was well-meaning but, for reasons of security, did not have access to the full picture. However, according to Baker, Collins’s superiors at NCIS were fully informed that Antoniades was in fact not a drug dealer but a covert agent.

  Collins, who still had his ear to the ground in north London, is convinced the reports were genuine and that Antoniades was a serious criminal. ‘Intelligence suggested that he was trading big drugs. His favourite trick was to sell someone the heroin and then arrange for his heavies to go and steal the heroin off the guy he had sold it to. He had moved down to the south coast and the suggestion was that he was using boats to bring drugs in. We came up with the top ten criminals in the UK that were dealing in drugs whom no one had tried to arrest and Antoniades appeared on our list. It was quite obvious that he was a major player.’11

  Collins saw all this as corruption. There was too much emphasis on targets for the numbers of tonnes of drugs seized each year. Informers were being used to organize big seizures, but the system was allowing the villains responsible to escape justice.

  In 2001 Antoniades travelled to South Africa, where he was arrested on an old Greek warrant for drug trafficking. He talked his way out of it, but in June he was arrested again on the same Interpol warrant, this time in Germany. British customs officers were now forced to reveal their hand to protect their agent. On 31 July the Foreign Office sent a telegram to the British Embassy in Berlin. It ordered staff to ‘press the case for Mr Antoniades’ release immediately’ with state and federal justice ministers. The man still flagged in national police computers as ‘suspected of being involved in organizing large shipments of heroin’ was being protected by the British government.

  I was leaked the document:

  CONFIDENTIAL

  FM FCO TO IMMEDIATE BERLIN

  TELNO 156 OF 311619Z JULY 01

  AND TO IMMEDIATE FRANKFURT, ATHENS

  INFO IMMEDIATE CUSTOMS AND EXCISE, ACTOR, WHIRL

  INFO ROUTINE HOME OFFICE, NICOSIA, NCIS

  YOUR TELNO 334

  SUBJECT: ANTONIADES

  Summary

  Agree suggested lobbying action in your telno 334. Customs and Excise ready to fly in to support. Main line of argument – need to protect informants.

  Detail

  We agree that the Consul-General should meet the State Secretary to press the case for Mr Antoniades’ release immediately.

  The telegram – sent at the behest of customs – told diplomats in Germany to make the case that:

  A public trial in Greece would reveal Mr Antoniades’ long career as an informant for Customs and Excise (1987 to date) and put his life at risk from criminal elements … Most importantly, Mr Antoniades continues to be a vital informant. His continued extradition would prevent one current anti-drugs operation from proceeding. [ … ] Were Mr Antoniades sent to Greece to face trial, it would make recruitment of informants very difficult, and ultimately harm our collective efforts to stem the drugs trade.

  The telegram mentioned a document prepared by Savery, Antoniades’s old handler, about his ‘earlier career’, but said this should be kept in reserve. If necessary the document could be handed over, with a warning ‘that a public trial might reveal this historical background thereby opening the possibility of an attempt on his life. So we would prefer to keep the Savery document in reserve.’

  The message was signed in capitals – like all Foreign Office telegrams – with the Foreign Secretary’s last name: ‘STRAW’.

  It was followed by a statement to the court from Nick Baker that testified that Antoniades, particularly between 1989 and 1992, had given ‘extremely valuable intelligence in relation to heroin trafficking and was responsible for a number of high value seizures including the biggest ever seizure at the time’. That was a reference to a tip from Antoniades that led to the 1991 arrest of a Thai intelligence officer at Heathrow with forty-nine kilos of heroin.12

  When he heard of the lobbying to free Antoniades, Collins was livid. ‘I got information that senior customs officers were travelling to Germany to secure his release,’ he said. ‘I was shocked. I could not believe it. He was one of the top ten drug dealers in the UK … He had been on the periphery of lots of murders.’ A meeting was called with customs at which, Collins recalled, the police were told that Antoniades ‘had been the best informant customs ever had and what he had given the UK far exceeded the damage he had done’. Collins thought this was ‘absolute rubbish’.

  In Germany, the pressure worked and the court released Antoniades. But the intervention seemed pre
mature. Under British rules, if informants wanted to avoid prosecution they needed strict approval in advance for committing a crime that was necessary to maintain their cover. Without such approval they had no protection from either prosecution or trial, and rightly so. They had no general licence to commit crime. If an informant was arrested and charged with breaking the law, unless their actions had been approved already, the informant’s help to the authorities could only be taken as mitigation after his conviction: a judge could then secretly use this background as grounds for a more lenient sentence.13 In the US, the FBI used a similar but more transparent system that gave informants a basis for committing minor crimes with approval from the Department of Justice. But the key point in both countries was that the crimes had already been approved. To run spies is to enter a grey zone, particularly when dealing with the criminal world. Compromises have to be made and interests weighed up. But a decision to sanction one crime to prevent another should not be made by the officers or even the agency that handles a particular agent; such waivers should be requested by a senior elected official or politician and signed off by someone independent, ideally a judge, who should also first make sure that he has all the evidence, approaching other agencies as necessary to ascertain how clean the agent really is.

  * * *

  By the early 2000s, Her Majesty’s Customs – a British national institution established in 1203 by King John and pre-dating Parliament – was in turmoil. It had always had its oddities. At the old headquarters on the Thames, the investigative branch, which was known for its camaraderie and high jinks, was housed in a big hall known as the Long Room. According to several former officers, bottles of whisky were sometimes stashed in the drawers and they occasionally used to play a game called the ‘Long Room steeple chase’ which involved highly trained officers leaping from desk to desk without touching the floor.

  However, the real issue was not oddities or jollities, but how customs handled its informers in the underworld. In particular, a series of convictions for smuggling and duty evasion were overturned because customs or its lawyers had concealed the fact that some of their star witnesses in court were also secretly employed as agents. There had also been a series of more straightforward blunders in agent handling. For years, customs had allowed some shipments of drugs to be brought from Pakistan into Britain by informers. These were so-called ‘controlled deliveries’, used to catch buyers in the act of handing over cash for the drugs. But in one disastrous case the drugs vanished on to the streets, making customs a supplier of heroin to criminals.