Top boy: stories of Hackney’s young drug dealers
Screenwriter and Hackney resident Ronan Bennett. Photograph: Grant Smith
Nathan is 19. He’s mixed race, tall, slim and fit. He has a No 1 haircut and is dressed in a T-shirt, tracksuit bottoms and trainers. He has a silver chain round his neck. His mobile rings. He speaks quickly: “Four on four, cuz, yeah… Wait a second.” He asks how much longer we’re going to be. Maybe another 30 minutes. We’re sitting at a table outside a café on Mare Street, next to Hackney Town Hall. I sip my drink. “Thirty minutes,” he says and ends the call. He looks at me, a slow look, unemphatic. “Customer.” What’s four on four, I ask. “He wants four 10-bags of dubs and four 10-bags of B.” Dubs? B? “Dubs are white drugs – crack and cocaine. B is brown, obviously, heroin.” Nat is a drug dealer. He never refers to his merchandise as drugs. He calls it food.
Nat tells me that if you’re selling food the best way to make a lot of money quickly is to “go country”. “Someone might come to you and say: ‘We’re making some money, you wanna make some?’ You go on a train or a cab or you drive and you come to a house and there could be 10 people in that house or more. We’re there to sell food. Lot of times there’s guns as well. One house I was in there was four guns. You gotta have guns cos there’s people, they found out you was in this house with all this food, they might think they’ll come and take your food, do you get what I mean?”
What part of the country? “Anywhere out of Hackney,” he says, deadpan. “Could be…” he thinks for a moment. “Was somewhere beginning with B, I don’t remember. Furthest I’ve been was Slough. I was in Finchley once and another place… begins with T. I don’t remember. In the house there’ll be thousands worth of dubs and B that someone further up the ladder has got and you’re there to sell them fast. You go out there and you sell and you sell, day and night. You’re selling to every type of person. White man in his 60s, young black man, women, all kinds of people. Some of them are nice people, but you gotta be bad with them until they get to know you. Like having a dog. You have to punish it up so it won’t bite you. I had one guy, he started to walk off with £160 worth of food. I went after him and said: ‘Bruv, where you going?’ And I punched him in the mouth and he said sorry. I said: ‘Next time you come, you come correct.’ It’s not a nice business to be in.”
Going country is hard work for foot soldiers (Nat’s self-description), exhausting. Nat might stay five or six days and nights in the house, selling food round the clock. The idea is to identify an area where there is demand, service it and get out before the police get wind of your presence. “Not everyone sleeps in the house. Some people, they finish by a certain time every day so they can go college.” He pauses. “You gotta understand, where I come from this is not bad. There’s people doing good things like going college and they’re also doing this.”
What image does “drug dealer” plant in your mind? Vinnie, a friend of mine, unemployed, a recovering user, had a friend he used to smoke heroin with, a reporter on a Sunday tabloid. One day his editor told him to get a story on evil foreign drug dealers peddling their wares to vulnerable English schoolkids. “Make it happen,” the editor said, which was commonly understood in the newsroom as code for “make it up if you have to”. So the reporter offered Vinnie £250 and Vinnie’s photograph duly appeared in the paper outside a north London secondary school captioned: “Evil Ivan openly boasts of selling drugs to children”.
Nat doesn’t fit the parodic Evil Ivan image. Nor, it has to be said, do most of the 20 or so other young people in Hackney I interviewed as part of the research for my TV drama Top Boy over a two-year period. They’re young, mostly black, little education, and all poor. Some, like Nat, give off an air of vulnerability despite being physically hard and capable, no doubt, of punching you in the mouth or worse if you don’t do what they want. But the overwhelming impression I get is one of weariness, sadness, as if they sense the futility of what they’re involved in. They are in a life they don’t like but don’t know how to get out of. A senior police officer who at one time worked in Hackney tells me: “They’re not necessarily bad people. For a lot of people in Hackney, buying and selling drugs is just part of the fabric of life.”
I’ve lived in Hackney for 25 years, longer than I lived in my native Belfast. I’m not a Londoner and never will be. With my accent you can’t be a Londoner. But you can be from Hackney and have any kind of accent you want. You can be any colour you want, you can speak any language, eat any food, wear any clothes. There’s everything and everyone in Hackney. It’s cheek-by-jowl, inner-city living. There are people who are doing well and people who can barely make it to the end of the week. I live in a nice house on a nice street. Come out my front door, turn right, walk 100m, turn right again, walk another 100m past the supermarket and you’ll see abandoned shops, boarded and chained up and patrolled by men in high-visibility jackets with “Security” on the back. They’re there to keep squatters out and the properties empty. Another 100m and off a side street you come to a rundown estate where, in the unlikely event you happen to be passing at, say, noon, you might well find a group of young men sitting on the concrete steps of the entrance into one of the blocks. They’re drinking Guinness and passing round weed. Sometimes a police car will pull up and the occupants – the “feds” – will eyeball the young men. The young men will jeer at them, insult them and dare them to do something. More often than not the police car moves on, to mocking laughter.
Des Hamilton, Top Boy‘s casting director, and Yann Demange, the director, found one of our actors here, sitting on the concrete steps. I don’t know what kind of career he’ll have. He’s good enough to have a career. He’s glimpsed it. Like his friends on the steps, he knows there are other things out there. They know there’s a world where they’d have better, more rewarding, more fulfilling lives. They also know they’ve been locked out.
Some months before I first meet Nat I pop round to the supermarket. I notice a kid hanging in the forecourt. I would say he’s about 12. A man in his – guessing – mid-20s approaches him and exchanges a few words. The kid slips away into an alley between a burger bar and a secondhand furniture shop. I decide to wait and see what happens. The man draws on a cigarette and looks up and down the street. The kid reappears. They do a street handshake. The kid spits on the ground and goes off. The man casually stoops to retrieve whatever it is and goes on his way. I go and do my shopping.
I don’t see the kid again for another couple of weeks. But then there he is again. Same place, same thing, different customer. After the deal is done I approach him. Even when I convince him I’m not a fed, he remains cagey. He talks a little, but not in the detail I want. Pretty soon he makes it clear that unless I’m going to compensate him for loss of earnings, I should leave. When, later, I tell the senior police officer about this incident, he shrugs and says: “As long as there’s no rise in ancillary crime – breaking into cars, muggings, burglaries – we leave it alone. If a 12-year old was selling drugs outside Tesco’s in Saffron Walden it would be a different story – there would be a major police operation.”
By the time I unpack my shopping I’ve already decided I’m going to write about this. The problem is access. I talk to my friend Gerry Jackson, a fitness trainer. In between benching, crunching, squatting and stretching, Gerry tells me stories about people he knows who work or have worked “on the road”. Some of the stories from the road are graphically violent. A gang break into a man’s house and torture him by using his chest as an ironing board; a finger cut off; another man buried alive. Gerry has lived in Islington and Hackney all his life. He is hugely respected. Every time I walk along Mare Street or Well Street with him, cars slow down and honk and the drivers wave to him. Men waiting at bus stops shout: “Gel!”
“He was in the hospital,” Gerry says of one grey-bearded man outside a halfway house. Gerry used to work in the psychiatric unit at Homerton hospital – known locally as the Hackney nuthouse – as a physical trainer. He hates seeing what long-term dependence on psychotropic drugs does to people and encourages them to train hard. “Training makes you feel good,” he says, “sweats those bad feelings out.” Sometimes I think Gerry believes training can solve all the world’s problems. He’s a no-nonsense guy, motivated, disciplined, fearless, keen on self-reliance, but always there for friends who are finding it hard to cope. Parents ask him to intervene when their children are going off the rails. Gerry hates the gangs. “They pretend like they’re your family, that they’ll look after you, that they’re there for you. But they’re not. They’re going to use you.”
I ask Gerry to make some introductions.
Nat is my first interviewee. I ask about his family. He lives with his mum and hardly ever sees his dad. “He lives up in Tottenham now. He’s got another family.” How does he feel about that? Nat shrugs. “I saw him couple of weeks ago in the street. He had a little kid with him. We talked for a bit and then he went on.” Did he want to talk more to his father? See more of him? There’s a pause. “Yeah,” he says eventually. “You know, yeah. But he’s got his own issues, you know. He’s got things he has to get through first, then maybe we can talk.” Nineteen-year-old Nat giving his father space and understanding.
All my interviewees talk freely. I get the sense they are responding to the simple fact that someone is taking an interest in them. In a Wetherspoon’s pub Gerry and I meet a pair of friends, both 19. Attila is from London Fields. He’s black and cocky. He flirts with the barmaid though she must be at least 10 years older and gets a smile and a look out of her. His friend John is mixed Chinese-Vietnamese and much more reserved. He doesn’t think Attila should be talking so openly and occasionally interrupts and tells him not to go into detail. John is Hackney born and bred yet talks with a sharp Chinese accent.
How did Attila get into it? He was a slow starter, he tells me. “I didn’t get focused on making money until I was 12.” John breaks in: “All them wasted years.” On his estate, olders (late teens to 20s) give youngers (younger teens) and tinies (12 to 13 and below) their drugs to sell or hold. Attila tells me about holding a gun when he was nine or 10. “It showed respect,” he says. “It showed the olders respected me.” Where did he hide it? “Where do you think?” he snaps back. “Under my bed.” John scolds him with a look. Did he get anything for holding the gun? “Three thousand,” Attila says. I don’t believe him. Unless you’re at the top there’s actually not a lot of money in this game. When Nat first started selling for the olders, they gave him sweets and cigarettes. Sometimes they would give him £5. But Attila is indignantly adamant and Gerry says he’s probably telling the truth.
Like Nat, like every young man I interviewed with the exception of John, Attila grew up without a father in the house. In Attila’s case this might have been a good thing. The first time Attila dealt drugs? He thinks for a while. “Probably that time when my dad took me to the minicab office, innit. Gave me a parcel and told the driver the address. It was out in the country somewhere. I think Cambridge. We got there and I knocked on the door and this professor or doctor or something, white man, come out. He said: ‘Give me the parcel’, but I said: ‘No, bruv, give me the money.’ So he gave me the money and I gave him the parcel.” What was in the parcel? “Food, bro, what do you think.” What age were you? “I dunno. I think 10.”
John declares himself to be smarter than Attila, declares Asians to be smarter than blacks. “My people don’t sell on the street like his people, no! We look down on his people.” Attila chuckles into his drink. He has three mobile phones spread out on the table in front of him. “This one is for friends, this one for family, this one for business.” There’s a lot of swagger, a lot of boasting. Attila claims to have made and spent thousands. But for all the bravado he seems weary. A lot of his friends in London Fields are in prison after a young girl was killed in a drive-by shooting in Hoxton. He wants to get a job, he says. Later I hear he’s applied for one in a shoe shop on Mare Street. John has already moved to the west country.
To make money out of drugs you have to move up the ladder, to become top boy, supply rather than sell. I meet my friend Duncan Campbell, the former Guardian crime correspondent, for lunch in Clerkenwell. He’s brought along Robert. Now in his 50s, Robert used to supply. How did it work from his end? “If a kid comes to me and says: ‘I want to sell your drugs’, the first thing I do is I find out if they’re from a good family. Because if that kid fucks up with my drugs, if he don’t bring me back the right money every time, I am going to take it out on his family. Don’t matter if the family have never been in trouble, don’t matter if they’re good people who go to church on Sunday. If that kid don’t bring the right money every time they’re going to suffer. Don’t matter if it’s only £5. They’re going to suffer. Because that £5, it don’t just represent money, it represents respect. It represents honour. It represents trust. Because that kid can hurt me. He can tell people who don’t like me where I am. He can tell the police. There’s got to be trust.”
I can easily imagine Robert being a very scary man back when he was asking about his foot soldiers’ families. But now there’s weariness. Robert went to prison. He’s written a book. He’s trying to turn his life around.
Most of the people Gerry introduces me to have horror stories – they’ve been stabbed, shot, betrayed by friends, gone to prison. None of them has anything to show for their labours. But then I meet Heather. She’s in her 30s, white, a single mum, very smart. She’s in a low-paid job when she gets pregnant. The father is not around much. She decides she has to get her and her unborn baby out of Hackney. She finds an empty council flat and with the help of a Vietnamese man equips it with lights, water tanks and extractors to take away the smell. She grows hydroponic weed. The Vietnamese man takes the first crop as payment for setting up her farm. “I wanted enough to buy a flat out of London,” she says, “and there was no other way to do this. I stopped as soon as I had enough for the flat.”
When I go to see her, her little girl is playing happily outside and when I replay the interview I can hear the birdsong from the nearby woods. Sometimes a person will do one wrong thing to put their life right.
Over two years, off and on, with Gerry’s help I talk to kids like Attila, John and Nathan. I talk to teachers, to schoolkids, parents, doctors, police, social workers, journalists. I do what dramatists do – throw it all into the mix, stir it around and wait to see what characters and storylines emerge. There’s not room for everything, and certain of my own preoccupations will always come to the fore: the struggles of disadvantaged kids; the absent father; the man who helps without being pious. I meet Charles Steel and Alasdair Flind of Cowboy Films and we take Top Boy to Channel 4, where we meet Camilla Campbell and Robert Wulff-Cochrane. The series is quickly green lit. Yann comes on board to direct. We don’t want to discuss the issues thrown up by what I’ve seen and heard. That’s not drama. Drama is story, character, the creation of a world. We want to take viewers viscerally and emotionally to a place they have heard a lot about but don’t really know. There’s a lot of bad in that world, but also a lot of good, and it’s just around the corner, 100m up the road.
Some names have been changed. Ronan Bennett’s four-part drama Top Boy starts on Channel 4 next month
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