News story -
Local authorities are cutting off funding for an anti-drug charity which spends £3.5 million of public money each year, after allegations that one of its most prestigious projects has been taken over by a professional cocaine dealer.
The Association for the Prevention of Addiction which includes the wife of the former Home Secretary, Michael Howard, on its board says that it has conducted an inquiry into its Crack Awareness Team in Nottingham and cleared its staff of all allegations.
However, a lengthy inquiry by The Guardian has found evidence that CAT’s manager, Dave Francis, aged 34, has been using the project as cover to enable him to visit crack houses and mix with crack users, posing as a crusader against drugs while supplying large quantities of crack cocaine. We have identified a network of distributors who work for him in the city and three key suppliers of bulk cocaine.
Francis, who is paid £21,000 a year for his work at CAT, drives a £49,500 Mercedes, owns two properties in Nottingham and has diamonds drilled into his front teeth. Det Supt Peter Coles, who recently retired as head of the Major Crimes Unit of Notts police, says that he has no doubt that Francis is an active drug dealer. Some 20 professional workers in the city have reported anxiety about his activities.
Former staff and clients at the project have accused Francis of being involved in selling drugs and guns and in the control of prostitutes. They say that he helped a 14-year-old prostitute to buy crack cocaine and had a sexual relationship with her; that he used heroin to buy stolen goods; that he allowed clients to take drugs in the CAT office and that clients who wanted to shake off their addiction were frightened to go there. Francis denies all the allegations and says he is the victim of racism.
Last November, a group of staff and former staff went to Nottingham health authority with a collection of specific allegations against him. After lengthy negotiation, APA agreed to set up a panel of inquiry in March this year. At the end of March, APA announced to the local press that they had completely exonerated Francis and his staff.
However, Nottinghamshire Social Services and the Nottingham health authority, who fund APA’s work in the city, complained that they were not consulted before APA issued their press release. The two funders have asked APA to produce a more balanced report of their inquiry and they have warned the charity that they have lost local confidence. The funders have told APA that they will not renew funding for CAT or for two other APA projects in the city, both of which operate under the name Open Doors, helping different groups of drug users.
Between them, the two funders have paid £192,000 to APA’s three Nottingham projects. CAT has also received £57,000 from the Department of Health, £16,000 from the City Challenge fund and £16,000 from the National Lottery. As manager of CAT, Dave Francis has been responsible for spending £171,082 of public money.
The chairman of APA, Sir Geoffrey Errington, a retired army officer and chairman of Harefield Hospital Trust, says he continues to have complete confidence in Francis. “He’s a good guy as far as we’re concerned. I don’t think we have been fooled,” he said. “As far as we were concerned we were happy that these things were rumours. There was no hard evidence.”
Francis last night told The Guardian that he had resigned from CAT. “It’s all in the past tense,” he said. Sir Geoffrey Errington, however, said he was unaware of any resignation.
Feature -
About a year ago, I started to spend time in crack houses in Nottingham. I had gone there to finish the research for a book about the underbelly of Britain and I was trying to trace the roots of the epidemic of crack abuse which had swept the black community there just as it had in cities across the country. And while I was there, I heard this very strange story about a man called Dave Francis.
On the face of it, he was a force for good. He ran a ground-breaking project called CAT, the Crack Awareness Team, which reached out into the dark heart of the inner city of Nottingham to help crack addicts who had been abandoned by conventional agencies. He was a leading warrior in the fight against drugs, a maverick who wrote his own rules and who had gathered such respect that he was invited to give evidence to a Parliamentary Select Committee.
But in the crack houses, they told a different story. They said Dave Francis had been an active criminal for years setting up armed robberies in the city and that now he had moved with the times and taken up a more lucrative trade – as one of the Midlands’ most active dealers in crack cocaine. This was no small time street-dealer, they said. This man was buying bulk cocaine from big-league suppliers in other cities and using a network of runners to sell it onto the streets of Nottingham.
Dave Francis’ explanation was simple. “I’m black,” he said. “I associate with people who use drugs, so that makes me a drug dealer.” There were only two possibilities. Either Dave Francis was the innocent victim of racial stereo-typing of the worst kind, or he was a peculiarly clever and unscrupulous figure, a professional drug-dealer who had infiltrated one of the biggest anti-drug charities in the country, a man who sold drugs to the same vulnerable young people he claimed to be helping.
I set out to discover the truth. I believe that I did. More than that I learned two lessons. One was about the weakness of the different authorities who work at the frontline of the war against drugs. The other was about the power of reverse racism and its ability to paralyse individuals and organisations who are afraid of being accused of race prejudice.
From the outset, there were powerful voices who insisted on Francis’s innocence. As the manager of CAT, he is available around the clock to help crack addicts in crisis and to guide them into rehabilitation.
The Labour MP for Nottingham South, Alan Simpson, who used to be a community worker in the city, said Francis was the victim of malicious rumour. A Methodist Minister, Rev Pat Brown, whose daughter is addicted to crack cocaine, said Francis’ work with his daughter had been “absolutely fantastic” and he would be amazed if he was a dealer. The Association for the Prevention of Addiction, who manage CAT, vouched for their man. APA are big. They are given £3.5 million of public money a year to run 17 projects around the country. They enjoy the blessing of the Home Office, the Department of Health, the National Lottery Fund and numerous local authorities. Sandra Howard, wife of the former Home Secretary, has just joined their board. Their chairman, Sir Geoffrey Errington had no doubts about Dave Francis. “He’s a good guy as far as we’re concerned,” he told me.
And yet the rumours kept coming. In fact, I think I never spoke to anyone in the crack world in Nottingham who did not say that Dave Francis was a dealer. More than that, different people in different places kept reproducing the same details. The skeletal woman lying flat out in a crack house, the retired villain who had known Francis for years, the prostitutes who smoked crack, the pimps who smoked crack, the dealers who sold crack, the social workers and policemen all shared the same evidence.These people weren’t the best witnesses in the world. A lot of them were out of their brains most of the time. But it was striking how they echoed each other.
For example, a detective named two young men whom he believed were Francis’s principal runners. Quite separately, a drugs worker who had never met the detective identified the same two young men. Separately again, one crack user after another volunteered the same names as Francis’s salesmen. Those who were really close to Dave Francis claimed also to know his suppliers. A lot of them named a woman in London. Several of them named two particular men: one who had made his money in a hot dog war in Leicester and then moved into cocaine; another who was an armed robber from Manchester.
Could all this weight of allegation be built of nothing more than racism? It seemed not. Some of the most angry voices which were being raised against Francis belonged to black people whose brothers and sisters were being destroyed by crack cocaine. A black family from the Meadows Estate wrote to the police to insist that they must act: “We know it’s Dave Francis and (another named dealer) that’s bringing it to the Meadows. Dave thinks because he has a job like that he’s safe. It’s all a front and the sooner you realise that and catch them, the better.” A black professional in Nottingham told me: “He is saying that he can help black youngsters, he says he is an expert in drugs. We all know in the black community that he is dealing in hard drugs like cocaine. We, as black people, are saying that the authorities are idiots because they employ people like him.”
Digging into the public records in Nottingham, it soon became clear that the first half of the allegation in the crack houses was certainly true. Francis had a long history of crime. He had started with petty thieving. By the time he was fourteen, he was serving a two-year supervision order for theft and burglary. Over the next ten years, he was a regular visitor to the courts where he picked up more than thirty other convictions for obtaining property by deception, burglary, theft, handling stolen goods, using indecent language, breaching the peace, causing actual bodily harm, having unlawful sexual intercourse, carrying an offensive weapon, possession of drugs and numerous driving offences.
As he got older, he seemed to get more dangerous. Several times he was caught with loaded guns and at various times he was convicted of carrying a firearm and ammunition in a public place, illegal possession of a firearm, and possessing a firearm within five years of leaving prison. Over the years, he was fined, cautioned and bound over to keep the peace; he was given supervision orders, community service orders and suspended sentences; and he was jailed five times, once in a detention centre, twice in borstal, and twice in adult prisons.
Francis claimed that he was reformed. The records showed that, although he had been convicted of disorderly conduct in the summer of 1996, he had generally steered clear of the courts for five years. He said a Christian had prayed for him when he was arrested a few years earlier and, unexpectedly, he had been given bail, so he had found God.
I went to see him and I was struck, as anyone would be, by the sheer wealth on the man’s body. He has diamonds drilled into his teeth and cemented into his ear studs. He wears thick gold bracelets and chains. He sports a watch which he says cost him £30,000 and a ring full of jewels for which he says he paid £10,000. He wears designer clothes; he is particularly keen on Armani and Versace. I went to his home, a detached three-bedroom house on a posh suburban estate where he keeps the latest range of Bang and Olufsen stereo and television equipment and a collection of champagne bottles. He also owns a flat in the centre of town. I went for a drive with him in his car, a dark blue Mercedes 320 SL which cost him £49,500 a few months ago. In the past two years, he has also bought a Porsche, a BMW, and a Saab Turbo Cabriolet. His salary from APA is £21,000 a year.
Dave says “So what?” He made a lot of money when he was younger. Out of crime? He’s not going to answer that. Did he keep the money in his bank account? No – a safe deposit box. Why? Because he wanted to. Has he ever dealt drugs? He’s not answering that. Is he saying that he supports this lifestyle out of the contents of one deposit box? He is not. He says he designs jewellery and only last week he sold £40,000 worth. He says he used to have his own gold shop, which earned him a lot of money, and a security firm, which did good business at raves for four or five years. He says if he was white, no one would worry if he was driving a Mercedes.
Was it possible that all of the allegations and all of the wealth were, in fact, a reflection of crimes past? I found a police officer who knew Francis well. Det Supt Peter Coles retired at the end of last year as the most experienced detective in Nottingham. As the head of the Major Crime Unit, Coles who had had access to every scrap of drugs intelligence and every informer report in the city. He agreed not only to expres his view but to do so publicly. He told me: “I am 100% certain that Dave Francis is an active drug dealer. Everything we know about him points to that conclusion.”
But if he really was a dealer, why hadn’t he been arrested? Another officer with long experience of drug dealers in Nottingham explained how police had tried repeatedly to find evidence to lock him up. He said Francis was now sufficiently successful to pay others to take risks for him. Witnesses were scared. There was also, he said, a special difficulty. His job. It gave him access to some powerful people. It gave him credibility. The officer said the police were worried that if they moved against Francis without first having water-tight evidence, he would use his connections in the city to accuse them of racism. Some weeks ago, a team of Nottingham detectives launched a new and concerted operation against him, in an attempt finally to bring him to court.
The voices in the crack house were still telling the same stories (and saying they were too scared to be quoted). There came a point when I could no longer persuade myself to doubt the truth about Dave Francis. I had to accept that this charismatic and apparently good-hearted man was a drugs dealer who had found the perfect cover: he was being paid public money to mix with his own drugs-runners and customers, selling the same poison he claimed to be fighting. I began to see how he was using his race to repel his critics and to confuse the authorities who should have stopped him. He was surviving in the gap between what people knew and what they could prove. Then, just as I was beginning to fear that I would never find the evidence to prove the truth, there was a haemorrhage of new allegations.
In the autumn of 1995 APA had taken over another drugs project in the city, Open Doors, and merged it with CAT. Early last year, some of the clients and the Open Door staff started to make complaints about Francis. Most of them were complaining simply that he bullied and abused them and that he failed to turn up to meetings. APA considered the issue and said that the staff had failed to understand black culture. A woman from Open Doors made a formal complaint to APA that he had called her a fucking cunt. It seemed hardly Christian, but APA said there was no evidence to support her. When the same woman was later battered and raped and failed to return to work while she recovered, APA sacked her.
A few months later, in June last year, a 16-year-old prostitute, who was addicted to crack cocaine, approached one of Francis’ new Open Doors colleagues and asked if she could speak to her in confidence. The prostitute went on to tell her that in the two years that she had been a CAT client, Dave Francis had given her spliffs of marijuana, taken her to buy crack cocaine and let her sit on the bonnet of his car while she smoked rocks of crack. She then complained that he had been using her for sex since she was only 14 years old, although she volunteered that she had originally provoked this. The drugs worker was unsure what to do, since the prostitute had insisted on speaking confidentially.
The next day, the prostitute repeated the allegations to the same drugs worker. This time, the worker insisted that she would have to take it further. Over the next few days, the prostitute made a series of phone calls to the drugs worker, pleading with her not to tell anyone that she had complained about Francis and reporting that one of Francis’ runners had been to visit her to ask her about what she had said. She threatened to deny everything if anyone asked her about it. “She sounded very angry and scared,” the drugs worker recorded when she reported the complaint.
APA’s area manager, Dominic Flanagan,
investigated. He asked Francis to respond and received a long letter denying the allegations and suggesting that he was being victimised because of his colour. “I feel that I am regarded as nothing more than a black gangster,” he wrote. The area manager then wrote his report without speaking to the prostitute or to her social worker who was aware of the allegation. He then concluded that there was insufficient evidence to support the complaint, made no criticism of Francis and, instead, criticised the staff who had received the prostitute’s complaint for failing to act more quickly.
A week later, Francis and another man were searched when they tried to visit an inmate at Lincoln Prison. Officers found they were carrying £1,000 in cash in £100 bundles. The two men were banned from the prison.
During the autumn, a group of staff and volunteers resigned in protest at Francis’ attitude to them and in November, four of them and one serving member of staff went to the Nottingham Health Authority, who fund CAT, and made detailed allegations about Francis’s involvement in drugs, prostitution and gun-dealing. After three months of wrangling, APA agreed to set up a panel of inquiry, consisting of three members of its own board, one representative from the health authority and one from CAT’s other funder, Notts Social Services. I obtained documents which were submitted to this inquiry.
In a written statement, Tony Herbert, who had managed Open Doors until his resignation, said: “I have been told by people well-established in the commercial side of the illegal drugs trade that Dave and (a named dealer) work together. Heroin comes from London and crack cocaine from Birmingham… I have also been told that Dave continues to be involved in the trade of firearms and movement of women for the purposes of prostitution. My ‘informants’ do not know each other and have been known to me for between 15 and 20 years. They all advised me to back off from Dave because of the potential for extreme violence.”
The documents showed that Herbert had relayed numerous allegations from clients. He refused to identify them but said that they had reported that Francis used heroin to buy stolen goods from them; helped one of them to sell a firearm; and drove behind two runners while they collected heroin from another city. In the same way, Sue Loakes, a team leader who had stayed on, gave evidence of a professional man who reported seeing Francis with a shocking amount of cash in his pockets and “bags and bags of weed” in his house; and of clients who refused to go to the office where Francis worked because so many addicts were “bang at it” in the toilets there.
Three addicts, who insisted on being anonymous, apparently in fear of reprisals, told the inquiry of scenes of chaos in the Open Doors/CAT office. They described clients cooking heroin in the toilets and lying stoned around the office; physeptone tablets scattered on the floor; an addict complaining loudly that he had gone into the toilet to shoot up some heroin only to find that his mate had just used his share. “There’s no gear left in the spoon,” he had shouted, according to an eye witness, who reported that Francis was in the office and did nothing to stop the injecting. They named an associate of Francis who, they said, had offered a supply of heroin to an addict who had just come out of a detox course.
One of the addicts, who lives near a crack house, described how he had seen Francis coming in and out of the house with packages. Another described one of Francis’ closest associates sitting in his car with a bag of heroin on his lap, bagging up £10 deals and selling them through the window to a group of addicts, whom he named. They told of young men who worked as Francis’ runners including one who had been seen handing a £500 bag of heroin to Francis.
An American drugs counsellor, Vernon Ward, who was running an addicts’ hostel in Nottingham told the inquiry how he had gone to Francis’s house to take him on a visit to addicts in Glen Parva prison and was surprised to see his fellow drug-worker openly smoking a large joint: “It was a large, Jamaicanesque brain-blowing cannabis cigarette,” he told me. An addict told the panel that Francis had been supplying crack and heroin to friends in Ward’s hostel. Ward confirmed that he had seen several incidents which persuaded him that this was true. The woman who had been battered and raped personally told the inquiry of her experience.
Some 20 professional workers reported their clients’ anxieties about Francis. These included the social worker for the young prostitute who had complained about Francis having sex with her; a psychiatrist who specialises in drug abusers, an assistant chief probation officer, a service manager from Social Services, GPs, social workers, a probation officer, a magistrate and the managers of other anti-drug agencies in the city.
APA concluded the inquiry and, in late March, produced a report which completely exonerated Dave Francis of any criminal offence. They issued a press release announcing that Francis had been cleared. I asked Sir Geoffrey Errington, the chairman of APA, who also chaired the inquiry, to describe how the panel had come to this conclusion. “We didn’t find a spark of prima facie evidence which was credible,” he said.
What about the three addicts? Hadn’t they provided any prima facie evidence? “I’m afraid we just didn’t believe them. We had our own expert who said it was pretty unlikely that anyone would bag up heroin in a car. You need a good, flat table. The witnesses were so easy to trip up.”
What about the American drugs counsellor, I asked. It was at the lowest end of the scale but didn’t he provide prima facie evidence of Francis breaking the law and, arguably, behaving in a way that was unacceptable in a drugs worker? They had not even asked Francis about that, he said. “We weren’t terribly convinced by the American.”
What about the young prostitute who had made such serious allegations against Francis? Sir Geoffrey said that they had looked into that and found no reason to change the view that the area manager had already taken. Had they interviewed the prostitute? No, they had not. Had they tried to interview her? No. But why not? Because they didn’t know where she was. Had anyone tried to find her? “I imagine that the people masterminding the calling of witnesses would have done it.” Who was that? “I’m not sure who was masterminding it. We were told that she didn’t want to appear.” By whom? “I don’t know who told us that,” he said.
In the background, there were complaints that APA was investigating itself. Tony Herbert and Sue Loakes complained that they had failed to call a group of prostitutes and a group of Open Doors/CAT clients who claimed to know details of Francis’ activities. Sir Geoffrey said he was quite unaware of any these potential witnesses. “Eventually we had to call a halt,” he said. “The feeling was that we weren’t going to get any more.” There is no suggestion that Sir Geoffrey, who had a long career in the army before taking up posts in industry and health, has failed in his duty at APA.
Francis had been supported by some witnesses, Sir Geoffrey said. A group of staff who still work for him as well as a group of addicts who still use the service had come to speak up for him. Alan Simpson MP and the Rev Pat Brown had both given evidence. The two men told me they did not believe the allegations. Simpson added that he had volunteered to give evidence because he was alarmed to see unfounded allegations being made by people who had their own agendas.
In the weeks after the inquiry closed, those who had opposed Francis reported a series of threats. The addicts, who had given evidence on condition of anonymity, reported that Francis’ runners were hanging around their homes. One of them moved house to get away. Sue Loakes’ car was battered in the street. Two witnesses were provided with quick-response alarms by the police.
APA then made threats of their own. They sent letters to Loakes and Herbert complaining that the allegations which they had made were malicious and defamatory and threatening them with legal action if they repeated them. In the case of Sue Loakes, who still worked for them, APA started formal disciplinary proceedings against her on the grounds that she had racially harrassed black staff. They suspended her immediately because of the seriousness of the allegations against her, even though they had failed to suspend Francis in the face of allegations of major crime.
With the support of her union, Loakes rebutted the complaint. However, while she was suspended, APA appointed Francis to take over her work, supervising a team which dealt with juvenile drug users. This meant that a man whom APA knew to be the target of continuing allegations of drug-dealing was given access to the confidential files of children with drug problems who were in the care of the local authority. Notts Social Services were so alarmed that they insisted that the files should be removed. APA resisted but finally, after a full day of negotiation, agreed that as “a gesture of good faith” and without admitting that there was any cause for concern, they would lodge the files with an independent solicitor.
In the meantime, APA had run into trouble with the two funders. Neither Nottingham Health Authority or Notts Social Services had been consulted before APA told the press that Francis had been cleared. Neither of them was happy with the report which APA had produced. They asked that it be re-written so that it was more balanced. However, APA resisted, arguing that the material which they wanted to include was defamatory. They suggested that the report should not be published and that even the two funders might not be able to retain their own copies. “We have produced the report,” Sir Geoffrey told me. “It’s our report, and that’s it.”
Two months later, the report has still not been agreed by the two funders. APA have been told that their funding in Nottingham will not be renewed as their contracts expire during the year and that they should allow staff from health and social services to become directly involved in running CAT. APA continue to support Dave Francis. “He’s a jolly worthwhile employee,” Sir Geoffrey told me last week.
Dave Francis continues to deny any involvement in drug dealing, although he admitted smoking a joint in front of the American drugs counsellor. In a long conversation last week, he said he was not aware of drugs being used in the office and he complained that Tony Herbert was bitter because he had resigned; Sue Loakes was malicious; the police hated him because he had once exposed corruption in a squad of detectives and because they were racist; the Guardian believed the allegations only because he was black. “It makes sense because I’m a goddamn nigger,” he complained. “I’m everything that’s bad.”
I asked him about the named dealers who are widely said to be his suppliers. He knew a Guardian photographer had been trying to take pictures of him and asked if he had been seen earlier in the week when he spoke to the former hot dog man from Leicester. He agreed this man was “quite prolific” but he said he did not buy drugs from him. “He’s a friend from before.” I told him that detectives were saying they had no doubt he was an active drug dealer and he said he knew that Customs and police had seen him recently holding a meeting in a service station near Derby with the former armed robber from Manchester. He said this man was “definitely a player, and his uncle in Holland, too.” But they had been meeting simply to sort out a feud. “A black man in a Mercedes meets a black man in a Ferrari. Everybody thinks it’s deal.”
In the black community, the epidemic of crack abuse continues.
Dark Heart, A Journey Through Hidden Britain, by Nick Davies, is to be published by Chatto and Windus this autumn.
