When armed police burst through his front door in Tottenham, north London, at 5am in September 2014, Glodi Wabelua knew things looked bad. The house was full of drug paraphernalia, including a hydraulic press, scales and mixing bowls, as well as a mobile phone full of incriminating texts advertising deals for crack cocaine and heroin.
The case went to trial in February 2016, and Wabelua’s two co-defendants – who, like him, were aged 20 – received 10- and 11-year sentences. Wabelua, who had lodged an early guilty plea a year before, was handed six years for dealing class A drugs. He was not new to the criminal justice system, having already served three years for drug offences in his teens. But soon he would be charged with an even more serious crime.
The dawn raid had been the result of a months-long investigation by the Metropolitan police gang unit. In spring 2014, five teenagers from London had been picked up by police in Portsmouth for dealing class A drugs. They were initially charged, but the focus of the investigation subsequently changed, so that the five teenagers were treated as victims of a network of established dealers based in London, of which Wabelua and his associates were the alleged ringleaders.
Cases of inner-city teenagers posted to provincial towns to deal drugs had been on the rise nationwide, and police had been looking for new ways to tackle the problem. When Wabelua was arrested in September 2014, his phone contained messages to a 16-year-old boy, as well as texts advertising drug deals in Portsmouth and Folkestone. In October 2016, six months after his conviction for drugs offences, detectives visited Wabelua in Brixton prison and charged him with an additional offence under the Asylum and Immigration Act 2004: human trafficking.
When the trafficking case was finally heard in the spring of 2019, the same two associates pleaded guilty to multiple counts, but this time Wabelua protested his innocence. He did not believe he deserved to be labelled a human trafficker. During the trial at Inner London crown court, the jury heard details of the case detectives had pieced together from DNA evidence and mobile phone data, as the five teenagers had refused to provide statements to police.
The jury returned a guilty verdict and the judge handed down a further three-and-a-half years in prison for Wabelua. In addition, he and his co-defendants were served with slavery and trafficking prevention orders under the terms of the recently introduced law on modern slavery, which would place severe restrictions on life after their release.
Wabelua’s case represented, as the media asserted, a legal landmark: for the first time, a domestic drug dealer had been tried and convicted as a slave master.
* * *
I first came across Glodi Wabelua’s story on a Friday evening in March 2023. Idly browsing YouTube, I’d clicked through to a video on a popular British channel that often interviews people who have spent time in and out of the criminal justice system: Glodi | Human Trafficking Sentence | Stabbed in OT | Raised in Forest Hill. Surely not, I’d thought. It couldn’t be the same painfully shy boy I’d known at primary school. The same boy who had lived a few hundred yards from the flat I’d lived in with my aunt and grandmother.
Any doubts were dispelled within a minute. The man on screen was Glodi from Fairlawn primary. We had never been close. In truth, our connection amounted to a few fleeting playground memories and a couple of enduring mutual friends. I watched the entire 80-minute video in a single sitting, as the story unfurled from the poverty of his early childhood, through teenage homelessness and drug running, to prison and the buildup to his trial. Wabelua, who had been released from prison the year before, spoke with unusual frankness, swerving any opportunities for self pity. As the video finished, I knew I had to reach out, to try to understand what had led the boy I’d once known into such darkness.
A couple of days later, I sent a message via Instagram, explaining my shock at coming across his story and the memories it had dragged up. I explained that I was a writer now and would be interested in talking. The response arrived that evening. “Can you send me your number … we’ll speak on the phone.” During our first discussion the next day, I could sense his wariness. An interview he had given to the New York Times the year before had been critical of the law that turned a low-level drug dealer into a slave master, and the piece had provoked a backlash in the British media. The Daily Mail wrote that police and prosecutors responded with “fury” to “another anti-UK story”. They called the article: “An extraordinary broadside on [the] British criminal justice system.”
When we finally met in April 2023, in a greasy spoon cafe near his home on the outer fringes of north London, Wabelua’s caution was palpable. The tall, muscular man in front of me spoke in short, methodical sentences as we chatted briefly about old acquaintances. He told me he had launched a personal training business, for which he is an incredibly jacked walking billboard. He talked about the challenges he faced after his release the summer before. Starting over at 28 hadn’t been easy. The anti-trafficking restrictions were harsh. His social media was limited to users over 18 and he was barred from being near children or visiting youth clubs and schools. To rent a flat, or a car, to accept a job offer, even to embark on a romantic relationship – all of these would need official approval for him to comply with his probation conditions.
Wabelua is an easy storyteller. He is serious and disciplined, but has a quietly self-deprecating sense of humour, particularly when outlining some of the fraught absurdities of his teenage years. Over the course of the year, we would meet at cafes or pubs in north and south London, and mostly at his flat, a one-bedroom extension at the back of a property on a busy suburban road. The more time I spent with him, the more I was struck by his candour and lack of self-pity. He did not see himself as a victim and had no interest in painting himself that way.
* * *
Of all the shocks for a five-year-old-boy experiencing his first British winter, the strangest thing was snow. Arriving with his mother and sister from the Democratic Republic of Congo in 1998, Wabelua was used to afternoons in the heat, playing outside with his older sister, evenings inside with mum and dad. Now he would scald his hands under the hot tap after coming in from the cold. Memories of life before the UK soon became a happy blur.
His father had made the move a few months before. They soon settled in a council house in Forest Hill, south-east London. At first, primary school was a struggle for Wabelua, who was cross-eyed and initially spoke no English. He was bullied and often got into fights. “I couldn’t really express myself verbally [so] that became my only response to what was going on,” he told me. His father, the family’s sole breadwinner, worked as a painter and decorator, though ends never seemed to meet, particularly when his two younger sisters were born at the turn of the millennium.
By the time Wabelua reached secondary school, life was no easier. “I struggled academically. It felt like I was always behind,” he told me. “I was still getting into fights. [They] became almost automatic. Weirdly, it started to get me some respect, because I held my ground.” His parents could not understand his frustrations and “it was hard to watch them struggle to put food on the table. Gathering every last bit of money to feed us all.” His older sister had attended school in the DRC and settled well in London. “She was more academic, very quiet and reserved,” Wabelua said. “Her skin is much lighter than mine. I only say that because the darker you are in this country, the less accepted, especially back then. It is what it is, really.”
Slowly, it began to feel as if the world was opening up, as early friendships solidified and his face gradually became accepted on the estate. He enjoyed playing football and embarked on a side hustle reselling supermarket doughnuts and cartons of Capri Sun in the playground. He was about 13 when he began to smoke weed, and soon he graduated to selling gram bags for some of the older guys in the area, who’d let him keep a tiny percentage of the profits. “I’d bunk school to smoke with my friends,” he told me. “It was a release from the bullying, from the pressure at home. That’s when you’d start building relationships with people. The people you trust.” Before long, his strict Congolese Christian parents were concerned at his poor school reports and increasingly lengthy unexplained absences. When it arrived, the crisis was sudden. One night after he got home, he sparked a joint in his bedroom, and his mother kicked him out. He was 14.
At first homelessness almost felt akin to maturity. It was now up to him to figure the world out by himself. Fear didn’t come into it. Sometimes he’d rummage in bushes, fantasising about discovering a bag of money he could bring home to transform his family’s life. There was even a routine of sorts. School, followed by long, aimless evenings on the estate with his friends, smoking weed and subsisting off chicken-shop meal deals. At night, there was the 176 bus, the 24-hour route that runs from Forest Hill to Tottenham Court Road. Wabelua would sleep on the top deck until it stopped in central London. He would then cross the road and get back on again.
That spring, in 2009, reality set in. Some nights he’d doze at the top of a stairwell on the estate, wrapped tightly in his thin summer jacket. He became attuned to the noise of footsteps, his head jerking to attention at their approach. It was tough to know who to confide in. He was still going to school, but he didn’t feel as if he could speak to his teachers, or that he could expect a welcome from his parents at home. Friends came to feel like family. One friend would sneak Wabelua into his house late at night. “I’d sleep under his bed and have a shower when his mum went to work in the morning,” he recalled. “That wasn’t every night, but I depended on it.”
It was that period that cemented his “loyalty to the streets, if that’s what you want to call it. Other people might say a gang was forming, when we just saw it as a bunch of young boys growing up together.”
* * *
After a couple of months, another school friend offered what seemed like a way out. An older guy had space for an informal tenant but he wanted £50 a week in rent. That kind of money was way out of reach of a homeless teenage boy, but the same schoolfriend had the solution: he knew a drug dealer in his early 20s, who always needed workers. Wabelua held out until the first month’s rent was due. Introductions were made, not long before school broke up for the summer holidays. “There wasn’t much talking,” Wabelua recalled. “And that’s how I ended up going to Hastings.”
For a boy who had barely left his borough of Lewisham, let alone London, the East Sussex seaside town, 60 miles away, came as a shock. He couldn’t believe how white it was; how much his face stood out. That summer was the first time he could remember seeing the sea. Having been driven down by his new boss, Wabelua was taken to a top-floor flat in a converted house on the seafront. The dealer spread different coloured powders and crystals from two small packages across a coffee table in the front room. “He said: ‘Do you know what these are? No. OK, this is called heroin, this is crack. This is how much they cost. These are the deals.’ From that day on I had to adapt and learn quickly.” Wabelua was shown how to wrap the drugs in cellophane and store them in his rectum to evade police searches. He was also given a phone, to set up deals with local users, as well as organising resupplies of product from his boss. “I just took things in my stride. It was literally just: ‘Any questions, pick up the phone.’” Then he was left alone.
Hastings in the mid-to-late 2000s wasn’t yet the subject of aspirational features in the property supplements. It was a slightly battered-looking town with a picturesque high street and pockets of deprivation. At first, the work felt simple enough, the wages decent: a few hundred pounds from a phone line that brought in £6,000 a week. Wabelua’s days mostly consisted of fielding calls and being directed from the flat he was staying in, to sort out hand-to-hand deals with drug users across the town.
He was a runner, the lowest level of drug dealer. Despite the stress of being ripped off by addicts and regularly stopped and searched by local police, there was an undeniable thrill to making money. “Consequences and morality didn’t come into it. I was thinking: ‘This is lit, I’m going to be a millionaire.’ I was so naive.” Sometimes he had to stay with drug users in town, whose flats doubled as stash houses. The conditions were often squalid and chaotic. After a few weeks, Wabelua started to feel paranoid. “I’d sleep with one eye open. You get to know that you can’t trust anyone in that situation.”
In September, after the summer in Hastings, Wabelua returned to south-east London, back to the flat he could now pay to live in. Instead of tatty hand-me-downs and baggy church donations, he had the latest Nike trainers and a wad of cash in his pocket. He started the new term at school in year 10, but things went no better. His attendance dropped below 30% and he was constantly getting in fights. When a BB gun and scissors – stupid adolescent hijinks, he told me – were discovered in his rucksack, he was permanently expelled, aged 15. Within days, he was back on the south coast.
One afternoon, he answered an anonymous phone call on his personal phone. It was a police officer from the Met, in London. Wabelua’s father had repeatedly been down to Lewisham police station to report his son missing. After weeks of not hearing from him, his parents had grown alarmed. “The officer asked if I was doing all right,” recalled Wabeluah. “I said yeah and that was it. He said he’d tell my dad and hung up. That’s the last I ever heard from them about that.”
His stint in Hastings eventually ended in 2010, when he was charged with possession of heroin and crack cocaine with intent to supply, just days before his 16th birthday. When his father came down to the police station, he begged Wabelua to tell him who he was working for. Wabelua refused. He pleaded guilty, and was sentenced to three years in custody.
Whenever we spoke about this time in his life, Wabelua shook his head disbelievingly. Back then, he’d never considered prison a possible outcome, especially as this was a first time, non-violent offence. “I honestly thought it would be community service or something,” he told me. To see how unprepared he was, you only had to look at the desultory prison bag he’d packed before being shipped to Cookham Wood, a notoriously violent young offender institution in Kent. “Not enough boxers and no money for canteen, it was rough.”
The prison was a high-pressure environment, pulsating with teenage bravado and trauma, including boys convicted of murder and other serious violence, some with sentences as big as their ages. “It was full of teenagers gassing each other up. There was no space for reflection, let alone rehabilitation. All it did was teach me how to be a criminal.”
* * *
When Wabelua left youth detention and returned to Forest Hill in 2012, aged 18, the world had changed. Old friends had moved on, some to college or university, others deeper into street life. His release conditions mandated living back with his parents, who had moved into a smaller flat. He had not lived at home for four years, he didn’t have his own room, and the atmosphere could be tense. Endless job applications went nowhere, barring a disastrous group interview at McDonald’s (“When they asked everyone how they’d spent the summer, I couldn’t say ‘prison’”). He was accepted on to a mechanics course at Bromley College, but lasted barely two weeks, as the classroom made him jittery. An unexpected noise, a sudden movement in his peripheral vision; it felt like everything reminded him of being in prison, waiting for the mood to turn at the least provocation.
He found himself back on the estate, broke and aimless. One afternoon, a white Mercedes pulled up beside him. It was the guy he’d worked for in Hastings, whom he owed money for the gear that had been confiscated by the police. Over a meal, Wabelua accepted a new job offer. This time he’d be a full-time phone operator based in London, fielding drug orders in Portsmouth and dispatching runners to carry them out. It was, he says, a modest promotion that promised better pay, though a percentage would go to servicing his debt. This was the point, the prosecution claimed at his 2019 trial, when Wabelua shifted from drug dealer to human trafficker.
A few weeks in, he was asked to work a short stint down in the Portsmouth stash house. The night he arrived, things immediately felt off. A woman he vaguely recognised had turned up at the door, asking for a friend. This was unusual, as unplanned visits were strictly prohibited. A couple of hours later, Wabelua opened the front door and glimpsed a blade. Two drug users burst in, demanding he give up the drugs and money. During a fight he was stabbed in the abdomen, before his attackers fled.
As adrenaline gave way to panic, Wabelua tried to contact his boss. On finally getting through, he was told not to phone an ambulance, instead holding out for the boss to arrive from London, an hour-and-a-half drive away. “I phoned a friend and told him to tell my mum I was sorry. I thought I was going to die.” He remembers passing out and waking up in the flat, being attended to by a medically trained associate of his boss, who had treated and dressed his wounds.
Back in London, he returned to manning the phone line. When calls came in and orders were placed, he would be the one telling the 16-year-old runner in Portsmouth what the amount was, where to take it, how much to charge. To Wabelua, he and the runner had much in common, despite the four-year age gap. They had grown up in the same tightly knit area and frequented the same social circuit. Both, he says, had gone into the drug trade through necessity. But the law would not see it that way. Wabuela’s life was again starting to spiral out of control. In the background, the police were beginning to amass evidence on the complex drugs conspiracy he was a part of. Then, in September 2014, came the dawn raid at his home in Tottenham.
* * *
Behind Wabelua’s unprecedented sentence – a domestic drug dealer prosecuted for human trafficking – lay a significant change in the law, and rising concern about the kind of drug operations he was involved in, known as county lines.
In the early 2010s, international pressure to tackle modern slavery had been building, with major stories appearing on the BBC and in the New York Times. In 2011, the Walk Free Foundation, a human rights organisation, began publishing a Global Slavery Index, which aimed to document the scale of modern slavery. Its 2016 report – launched in London with a speech from Russell Crowe, as well as video messages of support from Tony Blair, Richard Branson and Bono – said that almost 46 million people worldwide were trapped in unpaid work. “This isn’t Aids or malaria,” the organisation’s co-founder told the assembled press. “It is a man-made problem that can be solved, and it’s time to take real action to free the world from slavery once and for all.”
In the UK, as both home secretary, and later prime minister, Theresa May’s focus returned repeatedly to the evils of modern slavery. The Modern Slavery Act, passed in 2015, is a key part of May’s political legacy. The law was an attempt to tackle the gangs smuggling people into the country to work for low pay in terrible conditions. The headline to a 2013 Sunday Times op-ed had laid out May’s vision in unequivocal terms: “Modern slave drivers, I’ll end your evil trade”.
The groundbreaking legislation offered the prospect of life sentences for convicted traffickers, and protection for victims across the country. (Estimates today put the number of victims at more than 120,000.) But despite the genuine and compassionate concern of the many charities and NGOs working in the sector, some experts believe that politicians have co-opted the cause to further their own anti-immigration cause.
“Modern slavery is a great phrase for getting attention,” said Emily Kenway, author of The Truth About Modern Slavery and a former adviser to the UK’s first anti-slavery commissioner. “Theresa May picked it up as a cause at the same time she was tightening up the hostile environment.” Kenway suggests there was another agenda. As soon as trafficking was established as a priority for the Home Office, draconian immigration legislation could be presented as a fair response.
During the mid-2010s, while legislation was being prepared to tackle trafficking, another criminal trend began to appear in the British press: county lines. The “line” typically refers to the phone line used to conduct business and organise drug deals, though it also suggests the drugs physically moving across different police and local authority boundaries. In a 2015 intelligence report, the National Crime Agency warned of the growing recruitment of children and teenagers by dealers who sent them from inner cities to seaside towns or rural villages to move crack and heroin for little pay because they were “easily controlled and less likely to be detected”.
Though often treated as a method devised by a new breed of ruthless criminals, the origins of county lines could be traced back to at least the mid-1990s. What was new was the scale of operations. In 2017, the Home Office signalled its intention to tackle the problem head on, unveiling its dedicated County Lines programme two years later. By December 2023, there had been more than 15,000 arrests, close to 5,200 county lines “identified and closed” across the country and about 8,000 people referred to safeguarding agencies, according to government figures.
For some police forces, county lines represented a modern form of human trafficking – with victims being moved inside the UK’s borders, instead of across them. They reasoned that not only would trafficking charges add another layer of punishment for the criminals involved, but they might also safeguard vulnerable young people. The 2015 legislation offers a tool for both prosecution and defence: a means of punishing the perpetrators and rescuing the victims. But separating the two is not always so straightforward. Ossie Osman is a barrister at 25 Bedford Chambers and has served as the defence in numerous county lines cases involving modern slavery. If the Modern Slavery Act was originally devised as an earnest attempt to stop “the exploitation of individuals for a criminal purpose”, he told me, it has not always been that simple.
“The distinction between victims and perpetrators – between slaves and their masters – has proven impossible to act upon with any consistency,” said Prof Insa Koch, of the University of St Gallen in Switzerland. Koch has written and researched extensively on the intersection between the new modern slavery legislation and county lines in the UK since 2018. “In some instances,” she said, “you have one government body finding that a young person has been trafficked, while another insists that they are a perpetrator who should face the full force of the law.”
Not much of this debate had reached Wabelua during his drug dealing years. Human trafficking, if he ever thought of it at all, meant people being smuggled across borders in vans or airless shipping containers. On being charged in 2016, the information didn’t compute. “I think I actually said: ‘But I’m British.’”
* * *
The case against Wabelua and his co-defendants rested on the question of whether the teenagers had been trafficked. When it went to court in 2018, the trial collapsed after the defence claimed the prosecution had failed to prove that the alleged victims had in fact been recruited. The judge dismissed the trafficking charge, in part because she was not convinced the teenagers had been coerced. This was successfully challenged at the court of appeal. Vulnerable adolescents could – and very often were – “prone to making poor choices”, the prosecution claimed, and may well need “protection from themselves”. The case came back to court in early 2019.
The 16-year-old told police that he had started dealing to make money and was adamant that no one had forced him into it. Following his arrest, he was convicted of drug offences and served with a community order, before being reclassified as a trafficked child. Following Wabuela’s conviction, the teenager’s lawyers launched an attempt to have his conviction overturned.
Though the law permits limited amnesty to trafficking victims, this has not been applied consistently. From 2019 onwards, there have been a steady stream of county lines cases across England and Wales involving children and young adults simultaneously treated as victims and charged as perpetrators, despite the Crown Prosecution Service’s internal policy acknowledging the “strong public interest” in stopping a prosecution where the defendant is a victim of exploitation.
As a subsequent court of appeal judgment put it, the fact that the 16-year-old had been “so assertive with a police officer [and could] rationalise his reasons for being involved in drug dealing” did not exonerate his handler. “Brashness, self-confidence and a wish to make what appears to be easy money are commonly found in adolescents as well as adults,” the judgment ran. In this instance, the law is clear. The fact that Wabelua had organised the 16-year-old runner’s train travel from London to Portsmouth, for the purpose of selling drugs, was enough to serve as the basis for the trafficking charge.
Shocking details were relayed during Wabelua’s 2019 trial. The jury heard how a young man with learning difficulties had been stripped and threatened with a gun. Teenagers, the court heard, were housed in the dilapidated flats of drug users and had to ask for permission to use the bathroom, or to buy food. Both of Wabelua’s co-defendants pleaded guilty to multiple counts of human trafficking. Wabelua was eventually found guilty of the single count involving the 16-year-old runner, though there was no suggestion that he had threatened or used violence against the boy.
After we had spoken about the trial, Wabelua reflected that race and class impact heavily on young people’s chances of being swept into the criminal justice system. When he had been charged as a teenager, he recalled, “it [had been]: ‘Look, a black guy, a drug dealer.’ That was it.” He had not been considered a vulnerable teen. If Wabelua’s stint in Hastings had taken place a few years later, there’s a chance he might have been treated as a victim of exploitation, rather than a criminal, perhaps avoiding some of the vicious cycle he had become trapped in.
* * *
Wabelua told me that for a long time, it felt as if the story of his life was a collection of different phases that ran into one another without shape or reason. Dreamlike memories of early childhood in the DRC followed by the move to south-east London and the gradual disintegration of his adolescence. The long, stagnant years in prison punctuated by sporadic bursts of freedom. The wasted time spent in the drugs game and everything that came with it. Today, things are clearer, his focus fixed firmly on the future. Though he used to think “Why me?”, that isn’t how he sees things any more. “I’m not saying what I did was right. I know it was wrong … I should have known better, but that life was all I’d known.”
When Wabelua was released from prison in the summer of 2022, he was briefly placed in an east London halfway house. At 28, he knew things had to be different this time. He was fixated with keeping his head down, and build a new life from scratch. One nothing like the old.
He was determined to abide by the rules, diligently checking in with his probation officer and applying for a series of delivery driving jobs. Rejection piled upon rejection until Wabelua found his current role, which has proved stable enough. In early 2024, he messaged to say that he had finally qualified for his HGV licence, after months of work. Today, he credits his passion for fitness with getting him through the worst times. “Train the body, train the mind” runs the tagline for Glo Fitness UK, his personal training brand. It isn’t where he wants it to be yet, despite a steadily growing client base and YouTube channel.
In the months before his 2022 release, Wabelua had begun to write notes on a new plan that was both simple and ambitious. If fitness had changed his life, couldn’t it do so for others? Particularly, the same sort of at-risk teenager he had been so many years before. During one of our last meetings, he produced the worn blue notepad he’d set his thoughts down on in prison. It contained the rough draft of a tailored youth mentoring programme, reaching out to the next generation at risk of slipping out of vision. “I want them to understand things like emotional control. How to take responsibility for your actions and understand what your choices might lead to.” The sort of practical education he wished he’d had.
Late last year, the probation service approved Wabelua to provide a trial lesson in a pupil referral unit and give a talk to students about his experiences of the criminal justice system. The feedback had been overwhelmingly positive. “The organisers told me they’d never seen the students pay attention to something for so long,” he told me with a smile. “I’ve got a whole programme I want to deliver. Getting professionals and ex-offenders in to try and reach these kids who might have been given up on. Just like I was when I was their age.”
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