The Infiltrators

A couple of weekends ago we had lunch up in the mountains with my sons, my brother and some friends. It was there that we met the bikers, one of whom was our friend’s brother. He and his four mates all work for the Metropolitan Police and all of them have really interesting jobs, ranging from the drug squad, the ‘football hooligan’ squad and one guy was a deep undercover agent working for a very secretive group within the Met called SO10.

Unfortunately, I was at the other end of the table from the ‘bikers’ but one of them, Alan, kept nipping outside for a cigarette and my family, all fervent football fans, questioned him incessantly on his work and what it was like following football hooligans around the country, making sure they behaved themselves. His stories were both frightening and hilarious.

J, on the other hand, was seated next to the guy who used to work for SO10 and spent the whole lunch talking to him. At one stage she fired up her iPod Touch, which is always a bad sign cause it means she’s spending again and sure enough when we got home, she said the guy in question had co-written a book about his experiences as a copper inside SO10 and she’d actually ordered it whilst they were chatting – talk about being pretentious!

A week later the book arrived and given that I’m quite interested in that sort of thing (undercover ops) I started reading it immediately and couldn’t put it down. Phillip (his name in the book - not his real name) described how he joined the police and then became involved in SO10 – the deep undercover squad. He went on to relate some of the operations he’d been involved in and their outcomes.

The fascinating thing was that ‘deep undercover’ generally means infiltrating gangs and gaining their trust and this usually takes months to achieve. The book described the various ways and means he became involved with the gangs and the undercover lifestyle he had to adopt to fit in with his ‘targets’. The fancy, fast cars. The pockets full of cash. The days without sleep. The totally nasty characters he had to befriend in order to gain their trust.

The final operation in the book was a Midlands drugs bust which, and you could tell, was going to go horribly wrong, and it did.

If Phillip did not exaggerate in the book, then the Midlands crime squad to which he was seconded for this particular operation, were a bunch of bumbling amateurs, even to the extent that the money they provided him with in order to ‘buy’ the drugs on offer was unbelievably wrapped in plastic with the words, ‘Midland Police’ on it! You couldn’t make it up!

I won’t go into the details of how the operation went wrong just in case you buy the book but needless to say it did and big time. Phillip was shot twice in cold blood by one of the gangsters, but miraculously he survived (he must have, I had lunch with him) and of course, as the crooks were known, they were caught and tried. The problem is that as with all these ‘crimes against the person’, the crooks will be out of prison long before Phillip has fully recovered from his injuries. They’ll go back to making money from drugs and Phillip will have been pensioned off.

If you’re interested in undercover work then the book is a great read. THE INFILTRATORS can be found on Amazon and was available when I wrote this blog, postage free at the special price of £5.99.