On a spring evening, four men are chatting in a pub on the outskirts of Liverpool. They are discussing the logistics of a business deal. But this is a deal with a difference. The quartet are planning to smuggle drugs worth thousands of pounds into Britain from the Netherlands.
One of the men describes what he would do if he discovered an informer within their ranks: “There’s only one way to deal with a rat – put it down there and then. You cut its throat and you put it down. You don’t have tears in your eyes when you’ve done it. They’re fucking vermin. Fucking kill it.”
Those words were especially chilling for David Taylor, one of the men taking part in the conversation. As an undercover police officer, he was one of those “rats”. And he knew that the speaker had killed before.
It is extremely unusual for an undercover officer to talk about his work. However, Taylor has chosen to speak to the Guardian as he feels he was unfairly treated when he was abruptly taken off a covert operation. His superiors alleged that he had misbehaved, but he counters that any misdemeanors were trivial.
He believes that, on the contrary, the real reason for the early termination of his deployment, and the whole operation, was either police corruption or a desire by other officers to cover up embarrassing headlines.
Even 18 years later, Taylor, a stocky man in his 50s, is still angry about the way his investigation ended. He believes that the sudden and mysterious cancellation of the operation ended the possibility of prosecuting 20 major criminals. It also spelled the end of his career as an undercover officer. Since then, he has pressed police managers to investigate his claims properly. But, he says, he has been “ignored and fobbed off”.
The conduct of undercover officers has come under unprecedented public scrutiny in recent years, as those who have infiltrated political groups were revealed to have misbehaved – for example, by deceiving women into long-term intimate relationships. Taylor’s covert work, however, had nothing to do with monitoring political groups; he concentrated solely on targeting serious criminals.
Taylor (not his real name) started undercover work in the 1990s. For many years, he caught drug dealers by posing as a buyer. Working on what he calls “the lower end of the scale”, he would go to a dealer in the street or a nightclub and buy some drugs. The interaction would be recorded and then used as evidence to prosecute the dealer.
The work later became more intense. After completing an exacting course, he joined an operation infiltrating a network of criminals in Liverpool in 2003. His colleagues had laid the groundwork by setting up a fake business and renting a house in the area. It was a functioning business, but run entirely by covert police officers. Taylor became one of its “employees”.
“Part of it is to just be visible,” he says. “You’ve got to establish a routine. You’re running a business. You’ve got to run the house, of course. You pay the bills.”
He regularly went to cafes for breakfast – “perhaps a cup of coffee and a bit of toast, that type of thing. You’re just trying to make yourself real. You need to come across as approachable and be a credible character – you’re quite talkative and helpful.”
The key to being an effective undercover officer, Taylor says, is having a certain amount of confidence but not being “too cocky because then you’re going to get a smack”.
His cover story was that he was on the run from the police in another country. Gradually, he let it be known within the local area that he wanted to make some money and did not really care if it involved criminality – “just a guy trying to make his way in the world”.
The operation stepped up a gear after he became friendly with a long-term criminal: “We just seemed to click.”
Human relationships are at the heart of undercover work, according to Taylor. He spent hours socialising with this criminal, and most of the time they were not talking about crime. Instead, they chatted about everyday things – what was happening in their lives, sport or news events. “I would go round to his house sometimes, and help his missus prepare a salad in the kitchen, just what normal people do. Except in the midst of this, they’re doing illegal things.”
“You’ve got to remember, they’re not doing criminal things all the time. They’re loving parents. They love their wives. They love their kids. Then they fund their kids’ new Lacoste tracksuit by selling some cocaine.”
Taylor always knew, at the back of his mind, that he was talking to this man so he could collect evidence that would incriminate him. This he did by getting involved in his criminal scams.
“This guy supplied me with all sorts of things – class A drugs, stolen motor vehicles, stolen property from heavy goods vehicles, hijackings. It’s fair to say that he knew lots of people and had lots of interests. So through this individual, I got to meet other people that were part of this network.”
Undercover officers who infiltrate criminal networks will often commit crimes to fit in with the gang. However, they are protected from being prosecuted if their supervisors have given them prior approval to become involved in specific offences.
Taylor says that criminals scrutinise anyone more closely once they have committed that first act of wrongdoing together: “It’s a type of initiation.” From that moment on, undercover officers face more jeopardy. Forgetting that you have told someone something is “a huge problem”, particularly if it concerns a minor detail of your fake identity, such as the school you are supposed to have attended. “You’ve created your persona, but that doesn’t mean you can remember every single thing you’ve said and the more interactions you have with people, the more potential for a mistake.”
As an undercover officer, Taylor was constantly worried about being exposed. The key, he says, is to have a credible explanation ready in case you are challenged.
As a police officer, for example, he could not sample the drugs that he was buying. When asked, he told the criminals that this was because he had been an addict in the past.
Another key trait is to be able to think quickly on your feet and appear to be acting naturally in fluid situations. “There isn’t a script that you follow all the time; it just wouldn’t work, because you’re dealing with completely different people.”
Sometimes there are ambiguous situations where it is not clear if the criminals have suspicions about an undercover officer. Taylor remembers being in the flat of an obviously violent and unstable criminal. “I was sitting on the counter, chatting, and he’s telling me how they deal with informants and he has a big kitchen knife and is chopping up cocaine next to me.”
In 2004, a year into Taylor’s deployment, the operation, according to a secret police report, was going well. The undercover officers had collected evidence, including videos showing the involvement of 20 suspected criminals in offences ranging from supplying cocaine and ecstasy to handling stolen goods. It identified Taylor as having infiltrated the criminal network with “the greatest success”.
He began associating with a leading smuggler who was believed to be importing drugs directly from Colombia, he says. He had been introduced to him at a party one afternoon at an upmarket hotel. A group of criminals had hired a room where they openly took drugs from bowls scattered around the tables. In one bizarre incident, one of the criminals suddenly drew the curtains, warning the others: “You gotta be careful for snipers!”
Around that time, Taylor had picked up suggestions that a criminal in the network he had infiltrated had a “bent copper” in his pocket, he says. Soon afterwards, he was suddenly taken off the operation – a decision that has baffled him ever since.
The official explanation, set out in internal police reports, was that it was not possible to prosecute any of the suspected criminals because Taylor had allegedly broken the rules in six ways. One concerned a macho game of chicken between Taylor and one of the criminals – they had intertwined arms while burning each other with cigarettes and dared each other to see who would pull away first. The minor burns were seen potentially to be an assault on the criminal.
Taylor was also accused of twice allowing the same criminal to drive his vehicle when he knew that the criminal was disqualified from driving. Senior managers had, however, already taken the decision not to arrest the criminal for the driving offences as they wanted to prosecute him for more serious crimes.
Taylor was also alleged to have broken the rules of the operation by allowing the criminal to use his vehicle without him: the recording device in the vehicle was not permitted to be used when police were not in it.
For Taylor the official explanation felt “twisted and warped – it bears no resemblance to what actually happened”.
He has for years felt that he was made a scapegoat. “I maintain to this day that what I did was necessary and proportionate. It might not have been perfect, but these things never are.”
He suggests that police may have wanted to cover up a curious episode. Taylor was involved with the criminal gang in a scheme to import cigarettes. When the consignment arrived, Taylor suspected that the containers were full of drugs, not cigarettes.
He says he reported it internally within the police, as the importation of drugs would have been a serious breach of the law because the officers had not been authorised to participate in drug smuggling. He alleges that other officers claimed incorrectly that such authorisation had been granted.
Taylor believes that this apparent misconduct – worse than anything he was accused of – was overlooked.
According to Taylor, another officer said he feared damaging newspaper headlines along the lines of: “Undercover cops conspiring with organised crime to flood the streets of Liverpool with cocaine.”
After he was taken off the operation in 2004, he was transferred to other duties within the police until he quit a couple of years ago. During that period, he campaigned for senior officers to hold a rigorous and transparent investigation into his claims. He hopes to put more pressure on them by speaking out.
After examining his allegations, Merseyside police maintained that “there was no tangible evidence provided that would support” his claims. The force told the Guardian that it “takes very seriously any allegations of corruption and impropriety on the part of its officers. All such allegations are investigated and if appropriate criminal and or misconduct proceedings are pursued.”
Asked why he has pursued his campaign, Taylor replies: “Myself and my colleagues worked very hard for a long time, and under very trying circumstances. We gathered evidence on at least 20 people – very serious offences that would have resulted in double-digit sentences. So if we put ourselves in danger, we put strains on relationships. What we don’t expect is be stitched up. It’s not right.”
Told that some people would have given up years ago, he replies simply: “Yeah, well, I’m not some people.”
