I was sitting in a crack house not far from Kings Cross station in the middle of London. There was Vinnie the pimp, with his bare chest and his cigarette; a skinny blonde prostitute called Beverley who was so broke that she was using margerine for make-up; and Heather, a pick-pocket, who was about to go off to work in the big department stores in the West End.
The whole place looked like a stage set for a play about the dark side of life – bare boards, an old sheet nailed across the window, no sound system, no television, no books, nothing that could be sold, the three of them sitting on a greasy bed while I took the wooden chair in the corner. Then this man walked in.
He looked as though he came from another planet. He was tall and slim with a grey double-breasted suit, a well-starched collar on his bright white shirt and a shiney black briefcase in his right hand. And yet, he seemed to feel at home here.
He proceeded to find himself a space next to Beverley at the end of the bed, where he watched Vinnie fiddle with a small metal pipe while he talked politely to me about his work as an accountant with a big insurance company in the City. Then he took the pipe from Vinnie, held the flame of a match to its bowl and smoked it. Crack cocaine.
It was a couple of years ago that I started going into crack houses and brothels. I was researching a book about poverty in Britain, but to my surprise I started to come across well-to-do middle class people who had been sucked into these dark corners of inner city life.
Over and over again, it was crack cocaine which had dragged them down. For years, powdered cocaine has been part of the staple diet of trendy clubs, consumed by the young and affluent as though it were no more dangerous than an after-dinner chocolate. But crack – crystalline rocks of purified cocaine – is much stronger, and much more addictive and, more than that, it belongs to a very different world, a place of violence and despair.
Some of those who have been dragged down have been destroyed by the experience, like the glamorous blonde housewife from Nottingham whose marriage to an insurance salesman collapsed. She found a new boyfriend who persuaded her to start snorting cocaine powder and then to smoke crack.
Within two months, this woman who had previously spent her days running her two daughters backwards and forwards to ballet lessons was working as a prostitute, hanging around black nightclubs in search of her drug. Five years later, she is still a prostitute, she has lost custody of her two daughters, she has been beaten by pimps and abused by punters, she has a criminal record and she is still a slave to crack cocaine. She is known throughout this hidden world as Miss Popular.
Others have entered this world and yet managed to lead a double life. Some are public figures. In a brothel in a basement near Euston Road, I sat one afternoon and watched three women huddle together on a sofa poring over a book which I had brought them. One of them was the maid, who ran the flat. The other two were “working girls” in black stockings and dressing gowns.
The book was full of pictures of men, and the three women on the sofa were picking out those they recognised, not just because they were punters who came to buy sex but because they were drug users who came there to smoke crack cocaine. The book I had given them was Dod’s Parliamentary Companion.
By the time the evening came, they had picked out more than a dozen names from the House of Lords and the House of Commons. I might have dismissed this as nothing more than guess work and malice, if I had not already come across several of the same names in other brothels. One well-known MP, in particular, has made the mistake of paying by cheque in a brothel in Rosary Gardens, South Kensington.
In a penthouse in the elite complex of flats in the Barbican, I found a four-roomed brothel where an elegant woman named Carolyn was selling crack cocaine to a steady stream of brokers and bankers – John the Australian, Martin from Charing Cross, the city lawyer whose little black case turned out to contain his freemason’s apron. That was where I first came across the footprints of the legendary man in the Ferrari.
In a world of wild excess, this man was a giant of self-indulgence. In the Barbican flat, they said, he had once spent £20,000 in a single night, literally throwing his cash around the room, poking £50 notes behind pictures on the wall, giving fistfuls of cash to the girls, occasionally using them for sadistic sex and, all the time, smoking and smoking his rocks of crack cocaine.
I followed this man’s trail from one brothel to another across the West End of London. In one place, he had turned up in a new car and scooped armfuls of cash from the boot. In another, he had left £15,000 under the bed and never noticed it was missing. Everywhere, he had smoked prodigious quantities of crack, sometimes crawling around on the floor in search of a little extra. He was an addict on a vast scale.
In one brothel, I discovered his first name. In another, I found out that he had a big house in north London and another in Hertfordshire. Finally, in a brothel in the West End, a maid opened her diary and gave me his full name, his London address and his phone number. Several phone calls later, he agreed to meet me.
By this time, I had started to dislike him, not just for his greed but also for his abuse of the girls in the flats. In my mind, he was a smooth creature, handsome, elegant, evil. He turned out to be rather small and scruffy and strangely hard to hate. The truth was that he, too, was a victim just as much as the girls he had exploited.
He explained how five years earlier he had been living a life of comfortable security, trading stocks in the City for 30 years, married to a woman who loved him, with a son and a daughter at private schools, a town house near Regent’s Park and another fine home in Hertfordshire with a swimming pool and a games room. But he had had this tiny weakness – for prostitutes.
“One day I was with this girl and she said ‘Try this’ and I took it – and I was addicted. Instantly. She ruined my life.”
He spent all his money on crack in brothels. It appeared he also spent other people’s. When I met him, he was on the wrong end of some serious allegations of fraud. He had been arrested – in a grimy crack house in Ladbroke Grove, on the pavement near Kings Cross, and on the Mozart Estate where the police took one look at his Ferrari and pounced, assuming he must be a major dealer.
He lost all self-control. “When you’re on that stuff, you don’t know what you are doing. However much you have in your pocket when you go out, you spend it all. All of it. And in these places, they’ll give you credit, encourage you to spend even more, and then it’s ‘You owe us this’ and ‘You owe us that’.”
When he failed to pay his debts to one of the brothels, they called his wife and told him everything. She left him. To pay his debts, he was forced to sell his house in London and move into a cramped flat where he was living in fear of crack dealers and prostitutes who were looking for him to pay back money he owed them. Three times, he signed himself into expensive clinics. Three times, he emerged and went straight back to the brothels and to the crack.
When I met him, he had nothing. His phone had just been cut off. His car had been impounded. He had lost his job. He was selling his beautiful home in Hertfordshire. And he was trying to persuade himself that things were about to get better.
“I have learned things,” he said. “I have learned a lot about myself and about how absolutely corrupt the police are. But now I’ve stopped. I haven’t been to any of those places for… well, days now. I really have stopped.”
* Dark Heart – The Shocking Truth About Hidden Britain. By Nick Davies. Published this week by Chatto and Windus, price £16.99.
