World's Toughest Cops: On the Front Line of the War against Crime

World's Toughest Cops: On the Front Line of the War against Crime Vinnie Jones Welcome to the World’s Toughest Cops. This is a no holds barred look at a the people who risk their lives to serve and protect, in the front line of a war against drugs, gangs, gun crime, violence and smuggling.Vinnie takes the reader into the jungles of Colombia – where Sub-Lieutenant John Orejuela of the Special Ops Commando Unit leads a secret mission to take out a terrorist camp – and goes on patrol in the Californian suburb of Compton, following the cops caught up in a deadly cat-and-mouse game with the gangs of South Central LA. He recounts the struggles of officer Andre Steyn of the Flying Squad against car-jackings and armed robberies in the desperate streets of Durban, South Africa and joins the few good men trying to police the back-alleys and no-go zones of New Orleans, where the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina has seen a tidal wave of violent crime flood the city.Vinnie forged a reputation as a tough guy on the football pitch, and in America he now has a successful career in the cut-throat film business. But even he is in awe of the men and women who are trying to police the most dangerous areas on the planet. If on the pitch he followed Orwell's assertion that 'football is war minus the shooting', here he's discovering what life is like for those dealing with a real war – with real shooting. World’s Toughest Cops Vinnie Jones ON THE FRONT LINE OF THE WAR AGAINST CRIME DEDICATION This book is for cops everywhere who risk their lives in the name of law and order…but especially for those we met, got to know and saw in action for ourselves. Proper, straight-up heroes, every one of them. It was a privilege. Table of Contents Cover Page (#u336b080d-b9d3-552c-903b-55099635b118) Title Page (#u35de14f0-2d1a-56b3-be5f-82e6062c90e0) Dedication (#ua75a0307-382c-5973-ac74-57c53f186667) Introduction (#u8b01dbb2-9a1e-5673-b35d-1d8e86ff34c3) Colombia (#uaf8c3b13-f80b-5532-aa67-5de0a14a4a32) New Orleans (#ubfaa8efb-206c-5552-ac64-116f2d72d8a0) South Africa (#uf08dc434-df8a-54aa-a22b-20f3d3a137de) Kosovo (#litres_trial_promo) El Salvador (#litres_trial_promo) Laredo (#litres_trial_promo) Baltimore (#litres_trial_promo) Papua New Guinea (#litres_trial_promo) Jamaica (#litres_trial_promo) Los Angeles (#litres_trial_promo) Epilogue (#litres_trial_promo) Acknowledgements (#litres_trial_promo) Copyright (#litres_trial_promo) About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo) INTRODUCTION (#ulink_e6fa5a76-557a-5541-b75a-439711e95c27) Welcome to the World’s Toughest Cops. This is a no-holds-barred look at the people who risk their lives to serve and protect, in the front line of a war against drugs, gangs, gun crime, violence and smuggling. Over the following pages you’re going to see just what it takes to police 10 of the world’s most dangerous beats…and meet the men and women fighting a desperate battle to keep law and order. A couple of years ago I was asked by a TV production company to help them out with a show they were making. They were flying to meet cops in some of the most lawless places on the planet – and they were going to ride with them as they took down wanted men, busted gangs and smashed criminal organisations. Did I fancy coming along? Dead right I did…I wanted to get in there for myself, on the front line. I wanted to live and breathe the danger and the adrenaline of policing some of the worst neighbourhoods the world has to offer. I wanted to make it personal. Me and a bunch of guys flew out to see just what the score was. And we met some amazing people, had some amazing experiences. I’ve always believed in living every day to the full, pushing yourself to the extreme, giving whatever you do everything you have…but these guys taught me a lesson or two about commitment. They’re risking their lives, every day, because they believe in trying to protect the public, in trying to make their little part of the world a safer place. I was in awe of them. And as for the action…I loved it. The buzz was like nothing else I’ve ever known. But there’s only so much you can show in a TV programme. The cops we met were so dedicated, so extraordinary – and so much of what happened couldn’t make it on to the screen, that we decided to go one further. When I was asked to write a book to take in both series – from raiding terrorist camps with the Special Ops Commando Unit in Colombia to patrolling the back alleys and no-go zones of New Orleans, from chasing cop killers in Jamaica and Papua New Guinea to busting gangsters in South Central LA-I jumped at the chance. These are great stories; but they’re also true stories. We were there. All I’m doing in this book is showing what goes on – what these guys have to deal with day in, day out. And we weren’t hiding behind minders or security men: we were right in amongst it, out with the cops in some incredibly dangerous situations, usually kitted up in bullet-proof vests. This isn’t a Hollywood movie or a celebrity jaunt, this isn’t us pretending to be cops for a few days…this is real. This is us embedded with 10 groups of police officers around the planet as they put their lives on the line in the name of law and order. They are the world’s toughest cops. And this is how they roll. Vinnie Jones LA, February 2010 COLOMBIA (#ulink_8e84d480-69c0-5f00-a3ae-e7ec56169635) HEART OF DARKNESS: SPECIAL OPS WITH JOHN OREJUELA Colombia was always going to be a challenge. For decades, this bustling South American nation has been at war with itself: since the 1960s, government forces, left-wing insurgents and right-wing paramilitaries have all been engaged in the continent’s longest-running armed conflict. The consequences add up to nothing less than carnage. Terrorism like you wouldn’t believe, guerrilla warfare, kidnapping as big business – and sometimes small – and vast, powerful drug cartels worth billions of pounds. Dense, impenetrable jungles and sprawling slums. Incredible wealth and indescribable poverty. Kids with machine-guns, rampant knife crime, casual murder, political assassinations, dead cops…and everywhere the magical lure and deadly stink of cocaine. Trying to control this country is a nightmare. And it means the Colombia National Police are a force like no other. To nick a line from one of my favourite films, charging a man with murder in this place is like handing out speeding tickets at the Indy 500. Like I say, Colombia was always going to be a challenge. Not because of the violence, the danger, the risk involved in just getting in and getting out again…but because, with so much going on, we didn’t know where to start. THE YOUNG POLICEMAN stood to attention, facing a simple stone statue. In front of him, on a bed of rock, a pillar rose about 12 feet high; inscribed upon it were a few words in Spanish. Flowers had been planted around the base. Beyond lay a garden, a church, a complex of low, modern-looking buildings. Other police officers – some in uniforms, some not – passed by in silence. Behind the lone figure, the main road to Bogot?. A Colombian flag, whipped up by the mountain wind, obscured the view briefly; but when the breeze died down again, the view to the capital was clear. High rises, skyscrapers, vast jumbled barrios and slums. Beyond that – mountains. Jungle. The man didn’t appear to notice us as we walked silently up behind him; he made no movement, not so much as a tensing of the shoulders…but we knew he knew we were here all right. He’d been trained to know – and what he couldn’t be taught he’d picked up the hard way, in the field, in the firing line. Nobody was ever going to sneak up on him. This young cop was one of Colombia’s elite. We waited as he crossed himself, placed his hands behind his back in the ‘at ease’ position, gazed at the memorial for a moment longer, and then finally turned to greet us. ‘This monument was created for all of the police officers who died on duty,’ he explained. ‘The last one was Wilson Reinosa, my best friend. The guerrillas planted a lot of mines in a place we had targeted. He died from a bomb there. He was married. He had a son. He was young, like 27, but a very good policeman.’ We all, involuntarily, glanced back at the memorial. When we looked at the cop again, he was smiling. ‘My name is John Orejuela,’ he said, extending his hand. ‘I work for the Comando de Operaciones Especiales, part of the Colombia National Police. Pleased to meet you.’ The Colombian National Police Special Ops unit – or COPES for short – are a tight, elite strike force of commandos trained up for the most dangerous missions in this country. They were formed in the mid-1980s as a highly mobile, highly equipped squad for quick reaction to high-risk or crisis situations. Only 100 of the best police officers in Colombia are good enough for COPES. Trained by the SAS and the US Marines, they operate almost exclusively in life-or-death situations. Taking on the criminal untouchables – guerrillas, terrorists, drug cartels – COPES commandos are the front-line specialists in a deadly battle to keep order. John had been a COPES commando for nine years, and the veteran of over 100 missions. His relaxed demeanour, friendly attitude and easy-going, open features hide a seriously dedicated professionalism. He showed us his dog-tags, permanently strung around his neck, as important a piece of equipment for the commandos as any gun or bullet-proof vest. ‘We don’t know when we are going to die,’ he explained, simply. ‘So in all the operations that we do we use these – to identify us if something bad happens. Maybe a grenade, maybe a bomb.’ He shrugged and grinned again. ‘It’s a bit dangerous…but here in Colombia, somebody has to do it. And I like the action.’ It had taken a while, but we’d found our man. Colombia is a country born out of violence. Invasion by the Spanish conquistadores in 1499 was followed by over 300 years of oppression, rebellion and tribal warfare before the country won independence from Spain in 1819 – and another seven decades before the republic of Colombia was finally declared in 1886. And things have hardly been smooth sailing since then. For as long as there has been a Colombia, disputes between the country’s two main political parties, the Liberals and the Conservatives, have had a habit of getting seriously out of hand. In 1899 the country was torn apart by the Thousand Days War as tensions between the parties erupted into full-scale conflict – over 100,000 people died in three years – and 1948 marked the beginning of what they call La Violencia. For 10 years the Liberals, Communists and Conservatives fought in brutal, bloody clashes, mostly between hastily formed peasant militias. War crimes doesn’t even begin to cover the levels of lawlessness during this time: with guns and ammo scarce, the militias used whatever weapons they could, torture and rape were commonplace, and many of the warring factions developed their own unique ‘calling cards’ of corpse mutilation to frighten enemies and warn traitors. The Corte Franela or ‘T-shirt cut’ involves leaving dead bodies headless and with severed arms; the Corte Corbata (‘Necktie cut’) leaves the throat slit open and the tongue pulled out and placed over the chest; and for the Corte Florero (‘Flower Vase cut’), the severed arms and legs are inserted in the torso of the victim, so the dead body looks like a crude, gruesome floral arrangement. These horrific signatures originated during La Violencia but are still used today – by terrorist guerrillas and drug gangs for whom intimidation is as potent a weapon as death itself. An estimated 300,000 Colombians died in the 10 years between 1948 and 1958, but even after the formation of a joint Liberal/Conservative government and the official end of La Violencia, the troubles are far from over. Left- and right-wing guerrillas continue to clash – with each other and with government forces desperate to keep some kind of control. The official war might be over, but the killings go on. Someone is murdered every 30 minutes in Colombia. Political assassinations are common, terrorism is rampant…but chuck in a massive kidnapping problem, crippling street-level poverty and the fact that Colombia is the world’s number one producer and exporter of cocaine and you’ve got a crime cocktail that has left the country ravaged and reeling. Four different units are taking on the world’s deadliest criminals here. The drug squad, anti-kidnapping snipers, the Metropolitan police…and the commandos. And, of all them, it was the commandos we most wanted to see. They’re the ones on call and ready to roll at a moment’s notice. They’re the ones able to get in and get the job done – any job – and then get out again. They’re the ones with missions so secret, so dangerous, that most of them don’t officially exist until after they’re completed. But we couldn’t ignore the sheer scale of the challenge facing the other divisions of the Colombia National Police. Those trying to keep this country from descending into anarchy again are all putting their lives on the line in the name of a better Colombia. We couldn’t gloss over the fact. And that meant getting up close and personal with officers from all four units. Besides, we were going to have to wait for John Orejuela and COPES to get an assignment they were prepared to take us on. It would happen, they assured us. Before we met Orejuela, however, we had business in Bogot?. With a population of 45 million, Colombia is one of the biggest nations in Latin America. Right in the centre of the country lies the capital, Bogot?, home to over seven million people. Here, in the poor parts of town, casual violence is a way of life, and trivial disputes are often settled with a bullet: in this tightly packed maze of narrow alleyways someone is murdered almost every day. The cops patrolling these streets aren’t about to go out unprepared. With over three million illegal firearms now in circulation, and 200 policemen killed every year, the Bogot? Metropolitan Police aren’t taking any chances. They’re packing, on average, two guns for every officer. We met Sergeant Gilberto Avila, a veteran of the Met who has been deep in the barrios of Bogot? for 16 years – areas such as the poorest and most dangerous neighbourhood in the city, Ciudad Bolivar. Avila has the look of a friendly uncle. Where the younger officers are lean, toned and wiry, and most of the other veterans are carrying seriously intimidating bulk, he’s more…solid. The kind of guy you wouldn’t automatically put down as tough – until you got on the wrong side of him and learnt the hard way. His jet-black hair is receding and the smile in his eyes is touched with something like sadness too. He’s seen a lot of dead bodies on his beat; he’s met a lot of victims. ‘In this past week we’ve had five homicides…all from firearms,’ he told us. ‘The last homicide we had was two days ago. A person was killed with eight gunshots. What happened is what we call “settling of accounts”.’ It’s a euphemism and, like so much in this country, takes its cue from the language of big business. What it actually means, in this barrio, is another tit-for-tat killing. Revenge is a way of life here. ‘He killed someone and then he was killed himself,’ explained Avila. ‘The family of that person looked for him to assassinate him. But we are on the trail.’ Not that those close to the victim might appreciate Avila’s efforts. Sometimes, while trying to bring a murderer to justice, he can get in the way of that settling of accounts – and become a target himself. And all too often for the cops on the streets of Bogot?, it can be a case of kill or be killed. Not long before we met, Avila had recently experienced this for himself. ‘They saw us coming into the area and they started to shoot at us,’ he said. ‘Then we fired back. Unfortunately both criminals died at the scene. It’s not our intention to kill anyone. But if they shoot at us we must answer the same way.’ The few hours on night patrol we spent with Avila counted as a quiet shift – only a tense chase into the heart of the slums pursuing a local gang involved in dealing, assaults and armed robbery; and a couple of stand-offs with boys carrying knives. One of the lads was bleeding badly. No more than 16 years old, bare-chested despite the cold night, he had wrapped his shirt around his arm in a pitiful attempt to staunch the flow of blood. The shirt was sodden, and even as we talked to him he swayed, struggling to stay on his feet. He belonged in a hospital and Avila told him so. The boy shook his head. ‘What happened to you?’ asked the cop. The reply was simple. ‘They stabbed me,’ he said. ‘I haven’t been to hospital because I haven’t got any money or documents.’ Avila threw his hands up in disgust, then reached into his pocket. ‘But to buy this you have money, don’t you?’ He waved the stash of drugs he had just confiscated: basuco, cocaine residue. ‘The basuco is better than medicine? He doesn’t go to the doctor, he prefers to buy this.’ Avila was dead certain the kid was staying out of hospital until he had exacted his own revenge against the attackers, but there was little he could do other than take away the drugs and knife and hope the boy saw sense. ‘Even when we try to help, we face the risk of confrontations,’ he shrugged. ‘We are the eternal enemy of the criminals.’ At its most fundamental, crime in Colombia falls into two categories: street-level violence and organised terror. On the one hand there are those who Sergeant Gilberto Avila deals with every day, the poor and desperate of the barrios, fighting just to make it through another 24 hours…and on the other, something else entirely. Guerrilla groups and drug cartels operating on a level of sophistication the equal of any big business – but with a callous viciousness steeped in the Thousand Days War and La Violencia. They would seem to be poles apart – but they share some fundamentals. Money, drugs, guns, power. And neatly wrapping up the lot is Colombia’s latest growth industry: kidnapping. In the last five years, there has been an average of over 1,600 kidnappings a year in this country. That’s more than four a day and makes up around two-thirds of all the world’s abductions. Thirty-five per cent of kidnaps are carried out by guerrilla and paramilitary groups for political motives – but most of the rest are purely economic. Snatching someone and demanding money for their return has become as common a crime as mugging here, and people can be kidnapped for as little as ?100 ransom. Such an extreme problem needs a special solution. We hooked up with Sub-lieutenant Juliet Quintero, otherwise known as Nikita. She has classic sharp South American features and clear skin that wouldn’t look out of place in the pages of a fashion magazine…but make no mistake. She’s deadly. Nikita is part of the Colombian National Police anti-kidnapping unit – also known as GAULA. They are a special weapons and tactics unit, trained to carry out rescues in any environment – last year alone they secured the safe return of 136 hostages. That’s one successful rescue every three days. But Nikita doesn’t exactly negotiate with the kidnappers. She shoots them. Nikita is an elite sniper. She’s usually the first on the scene and she can end a kidnap with a single bullet. But she is also the eyes of the operation, there to cover the backs of police on the ground. If GAULA make mistakes, people die. It requires a steady nerve. Nikita, who was nicknamed after the female assassin from the movie of the same name, has been taking out criminals for four years. ‘My colleagues call me Nikita because I’m a good shot,’ she told us. ‘So far I haven’t missed.’ She uses an AR10 sniper rifle: deadly precise, it can put a hole in a coin from a full kilometre away. This means that in a rescue situation she can take up a position out of sight and range of the kidnappers and eliminate them before the ground troops storm in. Nikita was a disconcerting person; we didn’t know what to make of her. She was eerily calm when talking about her work, which was, after all, the cool, calculated shooting of men and women. There’d be no warnings before she took her shot, no ‘hands up and drop your weapons’…Nikita’s victims would barely even know they’d been hit – and they’d never know where the bullet had come from. Being a sniper must always take a kind of extreme composure, an ability to detach yourself from the reality of what you’re doing, but in the high-tension, high-stakes situations in which Nikita works, where trigger-happy, desperate kidnappers are prepared to kill anyone – including their hostages – in order to escape, there’s the added pressure that she can’t afford to make any mistakes. We couldn’t help asking her how she dealt with it. ‘You start to feel the adrenaline,’ she admitted. ‘You have to have more control over yourself, otherwise the nerves can get into you and you can make mistakes. It’s self-control.’ And she’s not about to let doubts get in the way of doing her job properly. ‘Even if they are criminals they are always humans,’ she says. ‘Of course. You don’t feel any satisfaction…but you have to take the decision to shoot or you’ll let the other person shoot first. ‘If I have him and I have permission, I shoot.’ It was cold – but it was also just the way things are here. And it’s one thing playing a hitman in the movies, acting out a role as a pitiless, ruthless killer…it’s another thing entirely to do it for real. As your day job. If I was to get a film part playing a stone-cold assassin, I now know exactly who I’d want to talk to about what it really feels like. Having said that, maybe her lack of pity is understandable: in Colombia, it’s not just wealthy individuals who are under threat. The guerrilla conflict means the police themselves are major kidnap targets. Barely 12 months before we met Nikita, police officer John Pinchao escaped after spending nearly nine years in captivity. He had been held by terrorist guerrillas in terrible conditions in a remote jungle encampment, his feet chained and his hands tied. Pinchao’s unit had been captured after a 12-hour siege of the town of Mit?, when up to 1000 guerrillas stormed the town, killing 16 policemen and capturing another 61. After a bloody shootout, the police ran out of ammo and were forced to surrender. Taken deep into the Amazon, Pinchao had been given up for dead long ago – by the time of his escape, he was 33 and had spent a quarter of his life as a hostage. Most of the other prisoners had been freed in a deal with the government but nothing had been heard of Pinchao since 2003. He only managed to get away after his guards forgot to chain his feet one night during a torrential rainstorm: he fled into the jungle, surviving for 18 days on roots and animals he captured with his bare hands, before stumbling into an anti-narcotics patrol. By then he was weak, exhausted, dehydrated and starving; doctors reckoned it a miracle he was alive at all. Nikita sees stories like Pinchao’s as a warning. ‘I think kidnapping is the worst thing can happen to a person,’ she said emphatically. ‘I won’t allow myself to be kidnapped. ‘When police are kidnapped it’s usually in times of conflict, when they don’t have any ammunition or have no cover. When I leave for an operation, I put extra ammo in my pocket. Always. Always. And if the situation arose and I had no ammo, and help could not come…’ She raised her hand, her eyes locked on ours, made a pistol of her fingers and held it to the side of her head. ‘If that happened I would rather take my own life than be kidnapped.’ Nikita was hardcore, no two ways about it; and Sergeant Avila was dealing with a daily nightmare of violence and revenge on the streets…but we still didn’t feel we were getting to the heart of Colombia’s problems. What made the cops here different? What made them stand out among the world’s toughest? We couldn’t ignore it any longer. We had to confront the worst this country had to offer. And that meant two things: the cocaine cartels and the FARC. The FARC – which stands for The Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia – have terrorised the nation for over 40 years. This guerrilla force began as the military wing of the Colombian communist party, and their aim is still to overthrow the government and install a communist state. They remain the largest insurgent group in South America – and estimates of their numbers range from 10,000 to 18,000 members. Their bloody campaign has been financed through kidnapping, extortion and drug trafficking. Tens of thousands have died in the conflict and the terrorists are responsible for more police deaths than any other form of criminal activity. It was FARC guerrillas who captured and imprisoned John Pinchao in the shootout at Mit?. Taking them on are John Orejuela and the commandos of the Special Ops Unit. We got in touch again, asking whether we could shadow the force on their next assignment. We could, they said. But first they wanted us to meet another man. Listening to him would help us understand just what COPES are up against. Deep in the jungles of south-eastern Colombia, 180 miles from Bogot?, lies the Colombian National Police anti-narcotics base, San Jos? del Guaviare. Here Colonel Gustavo Chavarro leads an elite division of the drugs squad. Working closely with the Special Ops commandos, Chavarro’s men are responsible for taking out the drugs at source. Although he’s got 20 years’ service and 80 men under his command, Chavarro isn’t afraid to get his hands dirty. ‘It’s a high-risk job and we in the Colombian police are aware of that,’ he told us. ‘But it’s what we like, what we love.’ Colombia produces 70 per cent of the world’s cocaine. Each year 700 hundred tons of the drug is manufactured here with a UK street value of ?28 billion. If cocaine were a legitimate business, Colombia would be one of the richest countries in the world – as it is, all that wealth goes into the hands of criminals, resulting in the formation of influential, highly organised and ruthless drug cartels. Most notorious was the Medell?n cartel – headed by the worst drug lord of them all: Pablo Escobar. Escobar ran the Medell?n cartel for over a decade…murdering and bribing his way to a ?2 billion fortune: in 1989, at the height of his power, Forbes Magazine in America declared him to be the seventh richest man in the world. Government officials, judges and politicians were all paid off – and if they couldn’t be bribed, they were ruthlessly murdered. Escobar made it a point of honour to execute anyone he considered a traitor or a threat: whether they were rival cartels, policemen, state officials, civilians, even members of his own gang – hundreds died at his word. In the poor barrios and slums, he was known to reward street kids for killing police officers, and he once described his policy in dealing with cops as ‘plata o plomo’ – silver or lead. Bribes or bullets. In 1985 he backed the storming of the Colombian Palace of Justice by left-wing guerillas: 11 of the Supreme Court Justices ended up murdered. In 1989 he was implicated in the assassination of Colombian presidential candidate Luis Carlos Gal?n, a liberal who had vowed to clean up the system. That same year he also ordered the bombing of an Avianca passenger plane – the aim was to assassinate just one man, another presidential candidate, but in the event another 120 people were also killed. Five American citizens were among the dead on Avianca flight 203. For the US administration it was the last straw: Escobar had to be eliminated. In 1992 United States Delta Force operators trained and advised a special Colombian police task force, charged with locating and taking down the drug lord and wiping out his cartel once and for all. Commandos from COPES were given US Special Forces training. They were taught that the old rules no longer applied: this was a war – and that meant that they were to do whatever it took to win. Over 18 months the task force conducted hundreds of raids, going up against the full weight of Escobar’s private army. Their tactic was simple and devastating – destroy everything that protected him, eliminate his most trusted allies. Nearly 100 of Escobar’s lieutenants were killed as the commandos got ever closer to their target. In December 1993, they finally got their man. After the drug lord was tracked down to a middle-class suburb in Medell?n, the task force swooped, and in the resulting shootout Escobar was hit three times – the last, fatally, in his ear. But if it was the end of the most powerful cartel of the 1980s, it was just the start of the modern troubles. Into the vacuum stepped other cartels…and the FARC terrorists. Between them they’ve carved up the cocaine trade – and taken Escobar’s legacy to whole new heights of ruthlessness. COPES can no longer manage on their own – and that’s where the narcs come in. Operating with the same military attitude – and the same level of firepower – as the commandos, Chavarro and his men are fighting the drugs trade at its most fundamental level: destroying drug crops and factories, flying deep into territory under the armed control of the cartels and anti-government guerrillas. They’ve paid a heavy price: 17 officers killed and 29 wounded on recent eradication missions alone. Chavarro told us about the last one: a raid on a suspected cocaine lab. ‘It was called operation Eclipse,’ he explained, ‘the location, destruction and legal inspection of two laboratories that produce cocaine.’ Four Black Hawk helicopters and 46 police officers made the treacherous journey into the jungle – all prepared and expecting to face armed resistance from the drug producers. The Colombian jungle is dotted with over 100,000 hectares of coca crops, often guarded with landmines and booby traps, and they also have to be ready for ambushes. It’s not something they’re prepared to do without the best weapons. Chavarro’s men all carry automatic machine-guns, and the Black Hawks are armed with GAU-17 miniguns, each of which can spray the jungle with 50 rounds a second. ‘God has given us the guns to defend our ideals,’ he told us. ‘We need good weapons. I take my men to extremely dangerous places. The only thing I want to transmit is confidence to my men – that everything will be fine. Even though I know I can’t personally guarantee it. ‘Our families know that we run high risks, and that we can die. I tell my family that the day I die in service they should be proud. But every morning when I get up I pray to God to let me grow old…I pray that he gives me the opportunity to become a grandfather and see my son grow up.’ On the last raid the drugs squad were revisiting an area notorious for resistance to the cops – several police aircraft had been shot down here before. Ground-level commandos had identified a new cocaine lab, however, and that meant acting fast and being prepared for the worst. Chavarro’s helicopters were in the air for 40 minutes before they reached their target, a clearing in the jungle and a makeshift laboratory. After several passes of the area, every gun sweeping the dense canopy of trees that could be hiding terrorists with rocket launchers and anti-aircraft weapons, the signal was given and the choppers landed. The squad was out and running when they had barely touched down, fanning out, fingers on triggers, ready for trouble. But as Chavarro told us with a sudden grin, this time they had been lucky. The criminals had fled at the noise of the approaching helicopters. And they’d left everything behind. A recently harvested coca crop, chemicals and equipment for making cocaine. A lab that size, he explained, could produce more than a ton of cocaine every month, with a UK street value of ?45 million. ‘So we set the explosives to destroy the lab,’ he said. ‘We took pictures, gathered evidence as quickly as possible – within seven minutes we were out of there again. This was an enemy area. It’s an area where we were exposed to attack. We can never get too comfortable because they might attack us when we are leaving.’ Even as Chavarro’s Black Hawks were rising above the jungle again, the explosives detonated, blowing to smithereens millions of pounds’ worth of Colombian Marching Powder. ‘It was a good mission,’ he told us, but not an especially remarkable one. It’s just what they do. ‘It’s always a successful anti-narcotics operation when none of our staff are kidnapped or injured and none of our aircraft are damaged.’ We’d heard enough. It was time to get in there ourselves. We wanted a mission. And as someone once said, for our sins they gave us one. Back in Bogot?, and our meeting with John Orejuela. As we stood at the memorial to fallen officers, we wondered just what lay ahead. Even Orejuela himself didn’t know – COPES missions are so secret, so sensitive, that all details are kept classified from everyone but the highest top brass until the last minute. We followed our man into the commando HQ and he explained that the only info he had right then was that, whatever it was going to be, it was happening tonight. It was time to get suited and booted. Inside the compound – more like a military barracks than any kind of police station – we followed Orejuela into the armoury and watched as he ran an inventory of his weapons. One by one, he methodically took the guns from the racks and checked them. ‘American weapons,’ he explained with a grin. ‘Rifle M4.’ We recognised this weapon – it’s standard army issue, the kind of machine-gun they’re still using in Afghanistan. Next up was something we’d seen in films and on telly, but never in real life – and certainly never expected a cop to be handling. It was an awesome looking thing, a stubby barrel and locking mechanism maybe a foot and a half long. Orejuela checked it, then locked it expertly on to his machine-gun. Suddenly the weapon was twice the size and about 10 times as nasty. ‘Grenade launcher,’ he said, simply. That just left the pistol. Standard issue Glock, with two magazines. It was strapped around his waist. ‘If we have a problem with this weapon,’ he indicated the grenade launcher, ‘then we have this weapon,’ and he hefted the M4 again. ‘And if we still have a problem, then we have the pistol.’ And if the pistol’s lost too? Without a word he unsheathed a knife, its blade spotless, glittering, reflecting our faces even as we looked at it. On went military-style fatigues and into a rucksack was packed headgear for night vision, and Orejuela was set. In the barracks around us, other policemen went through the same routine in silence, each concentrating on their equipment, knowing that, wherever they were going that night, and whatever they’d be up against, any slips or omissions now could mean the difference between life and death. Finally, we followed him into the briefing room. Sixteen commandos sat at flimsy-looking formica desks, eyes intent on the commanding officer, who stood like a teacher in front of a map and an overhead projector. He talked fast, in Spanish; we couldn’t keep up. Nobody asked questions, and the whole thing was over in 10 minutes. Afterwards, we asked Orejuela what was happening. It seemed that the police had received a tip-off about the location of known terrorists – members of the rebel guerrilla group, the FARC. Tonight, under cover of darkness, COPES were to execute a surprise helicopter raid on the remote hideout. They were flying out at midnight precisely: the last duty of the briefing officer had been to ensure all watches were synchronised. ‘We are going to look for terrorists,’ he explained simply. ‘It’s about terrorists. We’re going to catch them; there are three or four important guys they want us to bring in. We are going to have to keep our concentration because it’s classified high risk, the most dangerous it can get. They will be carrying similar weapons to those we use here. They use AK47 machine-guns…The weapons that they use are very good.’ Orejuela has had many run-ins with the guerrillas during his nine years on the force. ‘I’d say that on 60 per cent of operations they shoot at us. We know that the guerrillas have very good weapons. We have to be ready to fight with them.’ We hadn’t forgotten where we’d met the young commando – or that he had lost his best friend on a recent operation. ‘That operation was dangerous because we had 16 guys against 200,’ he told us. ‘And we lost five. Five policemen. It marked my life. When we lose a partner it’s like losing a brother. This is my second family. It’s very hard.’ But Orejuela has a reason to keep going. His father was a cop, and if that’s given him a keen understanding of just how dangerous the job is, it’s also instilled in him a belief that what he is doing is important. Not just for Colombia, but for his own family. Smiling again, he produced a wallet from his pocket and fished out a photo: a boy of maybe nine or 10 years old, looking both proud and embarrassed in his Sunday-best outfit of crisp white shirt, tie and blue tank-top. He had one hand on his hip and he stared straight at the camera, his face steady, unsmiling. ‘This is my son,’ he said. ‘I’m doing this because I want a better country for my son. Without drugs and without terrorists. Somebody has to do this job. This is my time right now.’ We looked again at the snap: the boy may not have had Orejuela’s smile, but there was something in his eyes that was the same. He looked like a future cop. If Orejuela joined the police in the first place because he wanted to follow in his father’s footsteps, it didn’t take long before he knew he was ready to step into the most dangerous law-enforcement job in Colombia. After just two years working the streets in the Bogot? Metropolitan Police, he put in for a transfer to COPES. He hasn’t looked back. ‘We do it because we love our jobs,’ he told us. ‘What can I say? We love it. Every week we train because we have to be ready. Everybody feels scared but we have to do it. Here in Colombia, somebody has to do it. We are prepared to do everything here – for Colombia and for our families.’ Around us, as we chatted beside Orejuela’s locker, his kitbag and weapons between us, we noticed other officers stepping past, all headed in the same direction. We checked our (admittedly unsynchronised) watches – there were still some hours to go before midnight. ‘They’re going to the chapel,’ explained Orejuela. ‘For each of us this could be our last mission. Many of the men want to pray.’ Just past midnight and we were airborne. Breathing hard and crammed into a Black Hawk helicopter with 16 commandos, 32 guns and hundreds of rounds of ammunition. All the men wore their night-vision helmets – the operation was to take place under complete darkness. Everything, right down to the chopper’s control panel, was blacked out. No big-match nerves here, no psyching up and hyping up. The boys were calm. They knew what they had to do. The target was an isolated group of houses just 30 miles from the base, where FARC members were believed to be hiding out. Intelligence had reported up to four important figures in the movement to be present, guarded by a security force of 20 men armed with AK47 assault rifles. We were outnumbered already. We were about to ask Orejuela about the odds, when we were silenced by a firm hand. The location had been sighted – a clearing in the jungle containing a cluster of four houses, plus outbuildings. The Black Hawk dropped fast. It was time to move in. Dropping to a crouch from the moment they hit the deck, the commandos moved fast and low towards the buildings, spreading out as they went, each of them slipping silently through the grass, safety off, poised to react instantly and ruthlessly to any attack. Within moments the principal property had been surrounded, every exit covered. All attention was fixed on the doors, the windows. Where would the attack come from? The door opened, spilling sudden fierce light into the blackness, and figures emerged. There were raised voices, shouting, arms in the air…but no shooting. No guns. No terrorists. The squad leader took three men inside. What they found was not in the briefing. The house was full of people all right: men, women, children, all taking part in some birthday, christening or wedding celebration. As a thorough search of the property turned up nothing, Orejuela grew exasperated. We’d been done. Either the intelligence was rotten in the first place…or else the FARC terrorists had received a tip-off about the approaching helicopter. Either option meant trouble of one kind or another. And Orejuela didn’t like it one bit. As we wasted time in this house, the helicopter was a sitting duck, an easy target alone in the fields on the edge of the jungle – and the terrorists could easily be regrouping, preparing themselves to strike. He beckoned us over and we sprinted towards him, mimicking the commandos’ crouching run, trying to look everywhere at once, all too aware of the hidden threat in the darkness. ‘It’s a bit difficult because there’s not just one house here,’ he explained in a whisper, his eyes still scanning the surrounding trees. ‘We’ve got three or four houses here. So when we landed in the fields they could quickly go.’ Unheard by us, the order came and Orejuela and his unit were moving again, slipping away from the first house and taking up positions around the others. If the terrorists had escaped into the jungle then there was little they could do – trying to follow them into the dense trees would be suicidal, even with their night-vision helmets. But if they had simply decamped to another building then there could still be a result to be had. Or a disaster. It was a chance they had to take. One by one the houses were surrounded, searched, secured. It was not the ideal way of doing things and left the unit dangerously exposed each time they moved to a new building…but it was the only way they could work it. Crouched where Orejuela had left us, squatting in the long grass, eyes straining in the blackness, nerves stretched to breaking point and with every hair on the back of our necks prickling in anticipation of a sudden shout, a burst of automatic gunfire, an explosion of pain and the end of everything, it was almost more than we could handle. This didn’t feel much like policing. This didn’t feel like The Bill, NYPD Blue, Miami Vice or The Wire. This felt like war. This felt like…Apocalypse Now. Suddenly, like a ghost in the dark, Orejuela materialised in front of us again. He didn’t seem any more relaxed. No terrorists had been found – and that was a bad thing. ‘Now we have control here,’ he whispered. ‘We have night vision and security around the houses. Nobody can walk in here without us seeing. We have control now.’ He paused and gestured with his machine-gun towards the edge of the jungle, the huge mass of trees looming at the fringes of the clearing like a tidal wave about to break. ‘The problem is that the people have run. They could be anywhere. That could be a big problem for us.’ Other figures loomed out of the night: the commandos were falling back, retreating to the helicopter, preparing to leave. The guerrillas had got away. There was nothing more they could do. We returned to base empty-handed; not a shot had been fired. With the Black Hawk whirring once again over the jungle towards Bogot?, the mood in the chopper was sombre. The operation had not been a success. But John Orejuela remained upbeat. For this cheerful, friendly, family man putting his life on the line to protect future Colombians from the worst that the terrorists, guerrillas and drug cartels could throw at them, the bottom line was that nobody died today. And that made it a good day. ‘Everybody’s good, everybody came back,’ he said, leaning forward and flashing that wide smile again. ‘No problem. What’s most important is that everybody comes back. ‘In this kind of operation, with the terrorists we have here, it’s very difficult: they have people everywhere with radios and cell phones. And they can call: ‘I hear a helicopter’ and so they leave quickly. So it’s difficult. But we’ve got to continue trying. It’s difficult, it’s not easy…but we have to keep trying. That’s the job.’ NEW ORLEANS (#ulink_8dc1428d-810e-5eca-b711-043588fdbbf9) BAND OF BROTHERS: TOE TO TOE WITH JEFF ROACH AND THE VOWS UNIT More than any other police force in America, the New Orleans PD have had to prove themselves. After the worst hurricane in this country’s history laid waste to the city, they stood alone as they struggled to keep order against a tidal wave of anarchy. They took on a flood of lawlessness…and they kept New Orleans on its feet. Just. Their battle isn’t over. The aftermath of the hurricane has left this city awash with guns and violent crime – and whole districts where teenagers with no hope of a better life take the law into their own hands. The NOPD operate above and beyond the call of duty: and right there at the sharp end are the Special Ops unit: the Violent Offenders Warrant Squad -VOWS for short. We met some real tight outfits around the world – but none of them compared to these boys. They had faced the worst the world could throw at them – and they’d come out fighting. They were still fighting. And I was going to fight right alongside them. New Orleans has a nickname: the Big Easy. But there was nothing easy about the job we were about to do. THE BOXING RING was in a corner of the warehouse behind police HQ. We’d noticed it before, the last time we were here, on the way to the cars…but I really hadn’t planned on seeing it up this close. The canvas and ropes, the talcum powder and sawdust, the padded corners…and that smell that only boxing rings have. Sweat and disinfectant. From outside it seemed big: I knew that once I was in there it was going to feel a whole lot smaller. As I stretched and loosened up, the place began to fill with New Orleans’s finest. They sauntered in, joking, laughing, looking forward to seeing the movie star, the former professional sportsman, the English guy, humiliated by one of their own. These were the NOPD’s Violent Offenders Warrant Squad and they were all tough men, used to taking it as well as dishing it out. And I was about to go head to head with their champ. In the ring. For two rounds. For real. I’d already been out on a couple of raids with these boys and I thought I was building up a pretty good rapport with them…but it seemed that if I wanted to ride with them on the action-packed evening shift I’d have to prove myself first. I’d heard about gang initiations, ritual beatings that new members had to endure before being accepted into the brotherhood…but I never thought I’d have to go through the same thing myself. Not with the cops. But that’s how these guys are. They’re a tight, solid unit, a proper band of brothers. They won’t let just anybody waltz in with a camera crew and roll with them…you’ve got to gain their respect first. My reputation precedes me as a bit of a hard man – they’d seen the movies, some of them even knew about my record on the football pitch – and so they’d come up with this little initiation test for me. They wanted to see if I was all mouth and no fists…and so they asked me to face one of their own guys in the ring. I knew they thought I’d refuse. So of course I said yes. To these guys I’m Hollywood – but what they didn’t know was that before coming out here I’d just spent six weeks in a gym training for my last movie. It may have been a few years since I’d earned a living as an athlete, but I haven’t exactly let myself go. And a couple of years ago I did a film called Strength and Honour with Michael Madsen, in which we both played bare-knuckle fighters. I know a bit more about throwing a punch than most movie stars. One of the guys taped up my hands and got a pair of gloves for me. I rolled my head, flexed my shoulders, jogged on the spot. I felt pretty good. I was ready to fight. And then Jeff Roach, the unit’s champion fighter, stepped through the door. Oh shit. He was big. Big? He was massive. He practically blocked out the light. He strode over, stuck out a hand and introduced himself. He had about 15 years on me, at least three or four stones and a good couple of inches in height too. We’d met Jeff before: he’s the team’s entry man, their top guy when it comes to smashing into properties. As one of the others had told us: ‘When we find a door Jeff can’t break through, that’s the door I’m getting for my house.’ I asked the boys for an extra-thick headguard. Behind us I could hear them laughing, placing bets on how long I’d last. Even our camera crew were getting involved. ‘I don’t know what your man can do,’ we heard one of the cops say, ‘but the young buck can hit hard, I know that.’ Jeff and I climbed through the ropes and squared up. ‘I’m fighting for the honour of the SWAT team,’ he grinned, before putting in his mouthguard. ‘And I’m fighting for Britain, flying the flag for Britain,’ I replied. ‘So long as you don’t put me on my arse we’ll be fine. Cos if you do I’ll kick you in the bollocks anyway.’ Jeff smiled again – and lifted up his long vest. He was wearing a protective box around the crown jewels. Everyone laughed again – seems like they really had done their research: more than Gazza ever did, anyway. I waved away the offer of a box myself – that got me some applause, at least. Deep breaths. Everyone was here to see me go down. Time to prove myself. The bell rang. Seconds out. Round One. The VOWS are the New Orleans Police Department’s Special Operations Unit, their elite squad. These guys are no ordinary cops; they deal with everything from tactical assaults and SWAT raids to cruising in ‘wolf packs’ in the city’s worst areas, on the lookout for trouble. The city is situated in the deep south of America at the mouth of the Mississippi river. It’s a beautiful place with a turbulent past – some of which isn’t too far in the past at all. The French quarter pays homage to its original settlers, but just a few miles away it’s a different story. The after-effects of Hurricane Katrina, which devastated New Orleans in 2005, are still being felt. Violent crime in the city is amongst the worst in the United States – and it was recently ranked as having the highest overall crime rate in the country, per head of population. The city is flooded with guns. Old city laws allow some New Orleaneans to carry handguns in their cars and on their person – which means that even those who aren’t allowed can get them easily enough: in the US it is estimated that nearly half a million firearms are stolen every year…and an unhealthy proportion of those gun robberies happen right here. The VOWS unit are on the front line of the crime war in New Orleans. Every day they are charged with bringing in the city’s most wanted: from armed robbers and murderers to prison escapees and drug dealers. They’re up against hardened criminals with a lot to lose, so a tough and uncompromising approach is always necessary. And when they’re not cruising the streets or serving warrants, they’re on SWAT duty, knocking down doors and storming houses. It’s a busy job. It’s also a dangerous job. We first hooked up with the squad as they were preparing for a SWAT raid – as it turned out, we would be so impressed with them that we’d stick around to cover all the other aspects of their work too. They had just finished their briefing when we were introduced – in the warehouse behind HQ. There was the boxing ring in the corner, but for the moment we were more interested in the fleet of vehicles parked up: specifically the SWAT truck, an armoured personnel carrier they call a Bear Cat. When one of these beasts is packed with men and charging through the streets on the way to a raid, the pumped-up, adrenaline-filled atmosphere is like the changing room at Wembley before the FA Cup Final. Times about a million. The team came over, already kitted up in bullet-proofs and helmets, all carrying machine-guns over their shoulders and pistols round their waists. There were 40 of them, just about the whole unit, and if they were dressed for business, they were also pretty focused. There wasn’t much time for small-talk and getting to know us: they were getting their heads together for the task in hand. The target was a man wanted for suspected murder. Intelligence had come through with an address – he was holed up in a house with a girlfriend and a couple of pit bulls. But the dogs weren’t the only concern: the team were also going to be looking for weapons suspected of having been used in multiple murders and armed robberies. Trouble was expected. Shooting was a serious possibility. According to the cops’ surveillance footage, the building was surrounded by high chain fencing – as well as their guns, the unit would be taking bolt cutters. Getting into the house and on top of him before he had a chance to try anything stupid was vitally important…and that was down to the unit’s number one entry man. We spotted him immediately. He carried a kind of battering ram known affectionately as an ‘enforcer’ – three feet of heavy metal that he would launch at the door until it gave way – and he swung it easily by his side like it weighed nothing. His name was Jeff Roach. Jeff’s job on SWAT missions was to get the team into the property – pure and simple. Having the enforcer helped, of course…but being the size of a mountain probably played its part too. And the bottom line was that Jeff had a reputation for being the best entry man in New Orleans. We nodded our hellos and got ready to ride. Because of the dangers involved in the raid – and maybe because at this stage we still weren’t known to the team, I still hadn’t proved myself to them – we would not be allowed to sit with the boys in the Bear Cat. We watched as they loaded themselves in, psyching themselves up, adrenaline levels maxed…and then, as they pulled out, we followed behind with Lieutenant Brian Lampard in a squad car. As we sped through the streets Brian outlined exactly what was at stake. ‘The guy’s suspected of murder,’ he said, simply. ‘He obviously has violence in his past. Depending on how bad he wants to stand his ground, it’s got the potential to be a violent rush.’ Finally we came to a stop outside a detached house. Almost before we could get our bearings the truck spilled out officers and they stormed the place. The bolt cutters did their work in lightning time and then they were at the door. Jeff swung the enforcer once, twice…on the third impact the whole frame buckled and smashed and they were in, guns drawn, shouting. The rush was amazing. We were back in the car with the lieutenant but even we couldn’t sit still. We could hear screaming, yelling, dogs going crazy – and then a woman appeared, still kicking up a storm, escorted away double-quick by a couple of the men. But what was going on inside? Where was the target? Brian’s radio buzzed and he gave me the nod. There was no sign of the suspect; the house was secured; we had the green light to go in ourselves. Even though we knew the place was crawling with VOWS boys, we still edged inside carefully, our hearts in our mouths. The place stank of dogs; dogshit was everywhere. It was a mess…but there was no bad guy. There was, however, his gun – a weapon suspected of use in a double murder. It was still a result. Outside again and there were mixed feelings from the team. The operation had gone well – in that no shots had been fired, no officers had been injured…and they had got the suspected murder weapon – but the target was still at large. One of the cops had a theory about that one: he pointed out a couple of kids on the corner of the street – all it takes is one sighting of a raid, one quick call, and the element of surprise is gone. It made me angry. That these guys, who are just trying to take a man suspected of murder off the streets – and are risking their own lives to do it – should be stopped by a kid with a mobile phone. It was…disrespectful. Half an hour before, loading into the truck outside the police HQ they didn’t know who would be coming home. They’ve got wives, families…and the fact is that on a mission like this they could have lost a man or two – just from trying to maintain a bit of law and order, just from trying to arrest a murderer. And then someone tips him off and all that adrenaline just dissolves into frustration. It made me angry: I couldn’t imagine how it must make the VOWS boys feel. It might only have been half the result they wanted, but it was still a result. The suspected murder weapon would eventually be destroyed, along with around 2,300 other firearms the NOPD recover every year. Also, I couldn’t help but be impressed watching the unit in action. These boys clearly know what they’re doing. I wanted to see more. I wanted more action. Next day the squad agreed to let me accompany a couple of officers as they served a warrant. They were going to bring in a man wanted for assault on his girlfriend and criminal damage to a property – we were going along for the ride. But I wanted to earn my place in the patrol car and prove I wasn’t just some tourist, a Hollywood actor come to gawp at the real hard men. From what I had seen of the unit they were a fiercely loyal, incredibly close team, prepared to lay everything on the line for each other: and I wanted to be a part of that. Big Jeff and some of the others had the day off: I was to ride with Officer Fred Faff on this one. He has served on the New Orleans streets for 15 years and with the Warrant Squad for four. He was a pretty relaxed kind of guy – and was keen for me to get involved as much as I wanted. I asked him what he thought about British policemen – he couldn’t believe our Bobbies do their job without proper weaponry. ‘There’s no way,’ he laughed. ‘There’s no way that I would go out on a street without a gun…Not here, absolutely not. They have criminals all over the country but in this city they are savages. They don’t care about anything.’ Before long we pulled up at the target house. Made, like so many in this city, of wood, it also had a reinforced door, on which was painted some kind of weird blue hippy mural. The windows had shutters over them. Without Jeff, access was not going to be easy. We stood and watched as Fred and the other officers knocked on the door – politely at first, and then with greater force. No answer. They rapped the windows. No answer. We followed Fred around the side, where a locked wooden door blocked access to the back yard. ‘Give us a hand here, Vinnie,’ he called, and we got stuck in. Fred shimmied up the wall and tried to get some leverage from the top while I gave it a bit of gentle persuasion from the front. Finally there was a pop, a crack and a click and it swung open. We were in. No holding me back now. ‘Open up,’ I shouted, hammering on windows, trying to prise open the shutters. Nobody believed the suspect wasn’t in – he was simply hiding, hoping we’d go away. Eventually, good old-fashioned determination paid off. Fred spotted him from the back of the house. ‘Come round to the front!’ he yelled, banging on the door. ‘Come round now and let us in.’ Finally the door opened and a skinny, half-naked man appeared. His hair was all messed and he only had a pair of shorts on…but nobody could have slept through the racket we’d been making. He didn’t seem too happy to see us and was now making a lot of noise himself, but the sergeant put an immediate lid on the situation. ‘Get dressed,’ he ordered and, with the man still protesting, raised his own voice in reply. ‘Listen dude, calm it down, take it down a notch! Your girlfriend put charges on you, deal with it.’ Eventually he got into a pair of trousers and pulled a T-shirt over his head, then the cuffs went on and he was marched into the car. ‘This is embarrassing,’ he said, nodding at our cameras. ‘You treat a man like a rat.’ The sarge just laughed at him. ‘Treat you like a rat?’ he said. ‘How’d you treat your girlfriend? Tell you what, we’ll put you in a cage and see if that’s treating you like a rat, eh?’ As he was driven away, Fred and I shook on it. ‘Good work,’ he said. ‘Getting that gate open was the thing. It opened up the whole case, right?’ He was half joking, but it still felt pretty good. The team were warming to us. What we didn’t know then was they still had one initiation test planned before they were ready to let us roll with them on the night shift. On the way to the bust, Fred had pointed out gaps in the houses, huge mounds of rubble and some buildings half-collapsed or with whole walls or roofs missing. The after-effects of Hurricane Katrina were everywhere. The city wore its scars for all to see. Not all the scars were on the landscape either. The VOWS Special Ops unit were the tightest squad of men I’d seen yet – but there was a reason for that. They had a bond forged out of the worst circumstances – they’d been through things together that you and I can’t even begin to imagine. And any dangers they might encounter today pale in comparison to what they faced in 2005. On Monday, 29 August 2005, New Orleans was hit by a storm greater than any in the history of America. Hurricane Katrina gained pace and power out in the Caribbean before unleashing a fury of biblical proportions on the Big Easy. Katrina changed the city for ever. The storm slammed into the levees and floodwalls, ripping them apart and releasing a torrent of water. The power grid shorted, the pumping stations – so vital in holding back the sea – were drowned. Within hours, more than three-quarters of New Orleans was under water: in some neighbourhoods by as much as 15 feet. People looked to the police – but the police were suffering too. At a stroke more than 70 per cent of the city’s cops became homeless…and as well as thousands of criminal files being lost, flooding ruined hundreds of guns, bullet-resistant shields and countless rounds of ammunition. Throughout New Orleans, citizens trapped by the rising waters and the lawlessness desperately took to their rooftops, or else barricaded themselves in where they could – often ready and willing to defend themselves with guns. On the streets, it was Armageddon, described by one local news crew as ‘a tidal wave of chaos and violence’. Stores were looted, houses were robbed, bands of outlaws and vigilantes roamed the streets, robbing, raping and pillaging at will. Police stations came under attack; paramedics were shot at; relief and aid convoys trying to get into the city were hijacked. Three days after the storm, National Guard helicopters were brought in to evacuate critically ill patients from one hospital – they were driven off by snipers. Doctors wheeling stretchers to the helicopter had to run for their lives as bullets zipped around them. Dead bodies floated in the dirty water, thousands more were suffering horrific injuries at the hands of the mobs…or were simply dying from starvation, lack of water, heatstroke. Society had completely broken down. Into the breach stepped the NOPD. We met one of the unit who, like so many of his colleagues, stayed here to do his job. His name is Jason Samuels and if any cop we encountered around the world deserves to be called a hero, he does. ‘It was almost apocalyptic,’ he said, ‘probably 85 per cent of the city was under water. At least three to four feet, and everywhere you had families stuck that needed rescuing. And then that other 15 per cent that was out of water, you had millions of people heading that way – basically to steal what they wanted, what they needed, just to find safety.’ Jason and the rest of the unit regrouped in a nearby school, determined to keep serving the city, putting the people of New Orleans before their own needs. ‘We basically learnt the survival mentality: we went and found stores that maybe weren’t flooded where we could get supplies like socks and maybe some canned food and we were able to sustain ourselves until help arrived.’ The unit spent as many hours of the day and night as they could physically manage out on the streets, patrolling the dry areas and recovering bodies from the flooded zones. The final death toll was nearly 2,000. But as if that whole situation wasn’t enough, Jason did all this with an open gunshot wound in his leg: just over a month before Katrina hit he was involved in a shootout with a fleeing criminal while on patrol in the city. He rolled up his shorts and showed us his left thigh – long, ragged scars ran down from the groin to the knee, and a big triangle of skin like a pizza slice was red raw and tender from all the operations since. ‘The gunshot wound in my groin area had never closed so I was constantly bleeding,’ he said, as matter-of-fact as if he was describing a headache. ‘My left leg swelled up to probably two to three times its normal size. The pain was such that I would just crawl to my boots or whatever, get dressed and go to work.’ It was unbelievable. We literally could not imagine how he did it. We couldn’t really get our heads around how anyone here coped – and our admiration for the cops who put their sense of duty before their own homes and families knew no bounds…but to do it with an open gunshot wound in your leg? To strap on your boots, haul yourself to your feet, go out and try to police the apocalypse when you could barely stand up? Unbelievable. ‘As far as American police forces go, I don’t think there’s any other unit that has been through what we’ve been through,’ he said. ‘It was akin to going away to war together.’ We could do nothing but shake his hand. Words can’t express what we thought of the guy. No wonder this unit were so strong. No wonder they were such a team. Listening to the heroics of Jason made me proud to be serving alongside them. And no wonder they wanted me to fight for my place on the night shift. It was time to earn my stripes. I had a date in the ring with big Jeff Roach. The bell rang and through the headguard the shouts of all the watching cops came through as a muffled roar. Word had got around and they’d turned out in force for this one. All the VOWS unit were here: and they were all looking forward to seeing their boy put the Hollywood hard man face first on the canvas. Jeff raised his gloves in salute and moved forward. I did the same. I was right about this ring: now I was inside, it seemed a whole lot smaller. To be fair, Jeff himself was taking up quite a bit of room himself. I was giving up a height and weight advantage – my tactic was to draw on my speed and nimble footwork to get me through this fight. At first it worked. Jeff dominated the centre of the ring and I danced around him, popping a few jabs in. Some even got through his guard. He moved with me, watching for the most part, knocking out a couple of slow jabs himself…I parried them easily. But then my fitness level started to tell. I may have spent a bit of time in the gym recently, but since I stopped playing football I’m nowhere near as in shape as I used to be. My legs couldn’t keep up with my heart, my dancing slowed to more of a soft-shoe shuffle. Suddenly a big right hook came out of nowhere and walloped me pure and clean on the chin. The world spun…my left knee wobbled, my right knee wobbled…I spun with it, wheeling away, managed to catch myself before I fell. Just. The noise of the watching cops was nothing compared to the roar in my ears. For the rest of the round I kept my distance – and most importantly I kept on my feet. The bell rang and I got a minute’s rest. I made it back to the corner and sat down. Our director – bless him, he’s a lovely boy, but he’s no boxing coach. He reckoned I had a shot at this. He reckoned I should play it Ali-Foreman style, use the old rope-a-dope tactic. Let him keep hitting me for another minute or two, let him tire himself out, and then slay him in the last 60 seconds, he said. Idiot. As I took in some water and tried to clear my head I could hear a couple of the watching cops talking to the cre.w ‘Don’t tell Vinnie now but if he beats Jeff we’re going to book him. He’s going to jail,’ laughed one of them. That did it for me. I came out for the second round fighting. I’d learnt my lesson and cut out on the fancy footwork. We circled each other slower now and I kept landing my jabs. With less attention paid to dancing like a butterfly I was stinging a bit more like a bee. And, more importantly as far as my face was concerned, I was keeping my guard up. As the round went on I landed more on Jeff than he landed on me. And that’s when I saw him grinning. The bastard. Suddenly I realised – here I was, giving it my all to stay in contention, and he was cruising at 60, 70 per cent. Whenever I put a few punches together he took them…and held himself back from coming straight back at me with a big haymaker of his own. The bell rang out and so did the applause. Jeff and I shook on it and then we both doubled up over the ropes. I’ve boxed for movies, but I hadn’t done anything like that in a long time…and I’d forgotten that sparring for the camera is nothing like actually getting in the ring for real. You think you’re fit, but after two rounds I was exhausted. Jeff was still smiling. ‘I’d have to take the first round cos I caught him with that hook, but Vinnie’s got to take the second round cos he put a few punches together on me that I just couldn’t defend. So we’ll definitely call it a split decision.’ He laughed. ‘He might have thrown the fight you know, cos he doesn’t want to go to jail.’ He was being generous. Let’s be honest: he could have kicked the shit out of me if he wanted. He was so big and strong. Any time he wanted he could have put it on my jaw and knocked me spark out. He’s the police champion, isn’t he? It didn’t matter. As far as the boys from the squad were concerned I’d proved myself. I’d gone two rounds with their champ. I’d given it my best shot and despite taking a whack on the chin had kept my feet. Like the man said in Raging Bull: he couldn’t knock me out. That’s what counted. I might not have won but I’d earned their respect. And with it came a place alongside them on the notoriously eventful night shift. When night falls, the challenge of being a cop in New Orleans becomes even greater. When the sun goes down the criminals come out to play. We’d already seen two sides of the Special Ops unit in action, on SWAT duty and serving warrants on wanted men – now it was time to run with the wolf pack. The wolf pack is the name the squad gives to a special tactical group that hits the city’s toughest neighbourhoods tackling crime as it happens, flooding an area with a gang of cars and enough men to take on the worst situations. They hunt by the light of the moon – and thanks to my battle with Jeff Roach, we’d got ourselves a place with them. After getting stuck in helping Fred with the arrest earlier, I couldn’t wait to get my hands dirty again. Officer John Barbetti was our partner tonight – he was another big guy, with the same easy confidence in his abilities as all the VOWS unit – and he assured us that if it was trouble we were looking for, there was a pretty good chance of finding it. ‘There’s murders here, you know, every day,’ he shrugged. ‘All we do is mostly proactive kind of work. Try to stop things before they happen, or while they’re happening. This is the ninth ward area, so there’s a lot of chasing, a lot of weapons violations, people are heavily into narcotics here…’ We peered out of the window as Barbetti drove. The streets were wide, the buildings spaced evenly out, like little Monopoly houses. It was flat, dusty, scrubby…these were the poorer areas of New Orleans and amongst the worst hit by Katrina. There were plenty of abandoned and missing houses, and most of those that remained were undergoing some kind of building work. Even four years after the hurricane, this place still needed a lot of attention. The radio did its thing and we responded. Another unit had apprehended a suspect and called for assistance. Three or four corners later and we were on it: another of the wolf pack pulled up seconds behind us. The suspect was standing between two officers, handcuffed, staring at his feet. Next to him a knackered old bicycle lay on the patchy grass. He was just a kid, skinny and wide-eyed. Barbetti asked what had happened and one of the guys pointed at the car. On the bonnet: one big shiny handgun. Loaded, too. Barbetti whistled. The arresting officer filled us in, immediately lapsing into that cop-speak they use, like he was filling in a report, or giving evidence. ‘I saw the subject emerge from the corner on a bicycle,’ he said. ‘And when he saw us he hopped off the bicycle and started fleeing on foot, digging in his pocket as he ran. So believing he was concealing a weapon, we jumped out and ordered him to stop. He continued running: as he got up into this area right here, he removed the firearm from his pocket and tossed it on to the concrete over there. So Officer Budrow tazed him and he was quickly subdued.’ Sounded simple enough. At least the kid wasn’t stupid enough to try using the gun. We asked him old he was. Sixteen, came the answer. Sixteen – here he was cycling around with a loaded gun in his pocket and he’s not even old enough to watch one of my films at the cinema. It got even stranger. ‘Ask him how he got the gun,’ said one of the cops, a big grin on his face. ‘You’re gonna love this…’ We asked the kid. His excuse was about as surreal as they come. If having a good imagination was taken into consideration when judges pass sentences, he’d be walking out of court scot-free. It seemed – according to him at least – that possessing the gun was just an accident. What he was really after was…chickens. He had been chasing a chicken underneath one of these houses when he just happened to chance across the loaded piece. He kept the gun; the chicken got away. Obviously we needed to get to the bottom of this. It was time for me to earn my keep and get some proper interrogation going. I wanted to see if there were any holes in his story. ‘What happened with the gun?’ I asked. ‘Where did you find the gun?’ ‘Under the house,’ he mumbled. ‘And what was the chicken doing under the house?’ ‘I was chasing the chicken.’ ‘Why were you chasing a chicken?’ ‘To sell it for clothes and stuff,’ he said, like it was the most obvious thing in the world. ‘You can get 10 dollars a chicken.’ Ten bucks? How come they don’t cost more when I get them from the supermarket? I moved on. ‘Are you quick enough to catch a chicken?’ I asked. We’ve all seen Rocky, we all know that scene where he tries to catch the chicken. If Rocky Balboa couldn’t do it, I was struggling to see how this skinny kid could. ‘Yeah,’ he shrugged. ‘You sure? How many do you get in a day?’ ‘I didn’t get none: I found the gun, I was going to sell it.’ It was his story and he was sticking to it; but it had also got him tazered for his trouble – 50,000 volts of electricity disabling his nervous system, knocking him out more effectively than a big right hook from Jeff Roach. We asked him how it felt. He raised those big, wide eyes and looked at us properly for the first time. ‘I was shaking like a chicken,’ he said. We couldn’t help but laugh…even though we knew that it was really no laughing matter. In New Orleans even 16-year-olds are involved in serious crime – young though he was, to the cops here there simply wasn’t anything that unusual about a kid of his age carrying a loaded gun in his pocket. ‘A lot of the armed robberies and now even the murders, the suspects are getting younger and younger,’ explained one of them. ‘So who knows what he had on his mind, you know?’ The point was made even clearer to us as the night wore on. The wolf pack drove through the ninth ward on a steady mop-up operation, racing from one incident to the next, pulling over suspicious-looking people on stop-and-searches, flagging down cars they didn’t like the look of…and responding to reports of shootings, muggings, drug-dealing. And all too often, the people we were questioning, handcuffing, taking away to the cells, were younger than my own son. Officer Dave du Plentier, NOPD veteran of 18 years’ standing, explained that that was just how it was these days. ‘Look at all these people right now, in these cars and in handcuffs,’ he said, as we joined him after yet another take-down. ‘Look at their faces. They’re kids, they’re children and you look at the hardware that they’re carrying out here. The rifles, the guns.’ According to some reports, as many as 50 per cent of teenagers drop out of high school across this state – and, in the poor areas of New Orleans especially, many of them turn to crime to make a dollar. ‘By the time we get to see them, the only thing you can tell them is death or jail,’ said Dave, ‘and guess what? They don’t care about either one. Jail is almost like graduating from college for kids out here, it’s like a pen on their shirt. They just do their time, learn in jail and come back out and keep doing it.’ On just the one night shift with the wolf pack we must have seen nearly a dozen suspects questioned, cautioned, chased or arrested – most of them, it has to be said, were teenagers. I did my bit too, talking to them, checking stories, filling in back-up units and helping look for anything dodgy that might have fallen out of their pockets…and the more work we did, the more I got into it. It was high-adrenaline, edgy stuff: and it was about to get a whole lot more edgy. I was beginning to think like a cop a bit too much for my own good. Back with Barbetti and we’d received a call to respond to yet another stop-and-search when the unit ahead spotted a suspicious car at the junction. Almost before we could radio them back, the car took off, tyres squealing as it disappeared down the road in a cloud of dust. Barbetti floored it and we sped after them. Houses zipped by in a blur as the speedo clocked up 50, 60, 70…when we hit 80 they were still outrunning us. More gas – and at 100 miles per hour the dust thrown up by the car ahead meant that visibility was down to practically nothing. Barbetti spoke low and fast into the radio, his voice barely audible over the scream of the siren – and suddenly we were braking, turning, swinging a hard right and then a vicious left before gunning full ahead again. We were on a road parallel to the target now, Barbetti pushing his car as hard as he could to try to cut him off. We flew over one intersection, then another, before the radio burst into life again. ‘We got a runner!’ he said, slamming the brakes and turning left again. The other chasing unit had reported that the suspects had crashed and taken off on foot. We skidded to a stop and jumped out. ‘He’s right around here someplace,’ he said, one hand on his holster, the other swinging a torch. ‘Keep an eye out behind us.’ There were more vacant lots here than occupied houses – some plots didn’t have any buildings on them at all and nature was reclaiming the ground. Sick-looking, stunted bushes, long grass, even trees were growing just off the road – meaning we couldn’t get a clear line of sight for more than a couple of metres. There were plenty of places to hide here, and so far there was only us two units on the scene. Suddenly I spotted a man legging it across the road and into the bushes. Barbetti saw him at the same time and took off. ‘Come here! Get down, get down, get down!’ he yelled, and dived into the darkness after him. We looked around. Where was back-up? Barbetti had gone after the runner and suddenly we were totally alone. More to the point – what if the big cop wasn’t fast enough? Somebody needed to head round the other side, cut him off, catch him coming out. There was nothing for it. Pulling my bullet-proof vest tight, I took a deep breath and sprinted hard over the road, skirting the scrub on my right. Call it brave, call it foolish, call it what you like – the adrenaline had kicked in and after all my experiences with these boys I wanted to grab the chance to show what I could do. I honestly didn’t think about my own safety, not right then. We’d just come off the back of a 100-mile-an-hour chase after a night of taking down kids with guns and I had the wind up me. If I could nail this guy I was bloody well going to. I cut diagonally into the vacant lots and burst through the bushes, every nerve straining, every muscle ready to floor the bastard…and nearly ran straight into the cops from the other unit. They had him on the ground, were slapping the cuffs on, and when they saw me come thundering through one of them held up a hand. ‘We got him, Vin,’ he said. Just then Barbetti came charging out of the trees on the other side. Call it a pincer movement then – I may not have notched up my first take-down, but we couldn’t have co-ordinated it better if we’d planned it. Like flushing out a rat. One down. But there was still another at large. The boy we’d chased down – and, like all the others, he was just a boy, another teenage kid who’d fallen through the cracks in the system – confirmed that he wasn’t alone. The car was stolen, he said: but it was the other guy who stole it, when he got picked up he didn’t even know it was nicked. He said he didn’t know if his friend had a gun. The Canine Unit was called. In this jumble of empty and smashed-up houses, derelict plots and scrubby wasteland, there were a million places to hide. Dogs might just give us the edge. As they did their work, we moved with them. All the cops searched with guns drawn and we shadowed them, scouring the area ourselves, eyes peeled, senses straining for any sign. I still hadn’t come down from the rush of chasing the first suspect: right then I wasn’t thinking about my family, or my career, or even making a TV show about these guys – all I was thinking was how we needed to find this kid. If I could help, I would help any way I could. And for their part, the squad were right there with me. Nobody questioned what I was doing, nobody asked me to hang back and leave it to the professionals. Finally, it seemed, I was one of the team. We searched for over an hour. We went through every garden, every abandoned house…the dogs snuffled and sniffed, and we followed them, peering and probing every nook and cranny of the neighbourhood. We couldn’t find him. He’d disappeared, like a ghost into the New Orleans night. Back at the car, Barbetti wasn’t too downbeat. ‘Listen, man,’ he said, ‘you did a good job tonight. You did a good job spotting the guy. It was good eyesight and it led to an apprehension. And as for the chase…that was something else. There’s one more criminal off the street right now.’ The chase. The adrenaline was wearing off and the reality of what I’d done was beginning to kick in. We’d seen so many guns in this city…thank God there were none involved right here. We left with hearts still hammering. The New Orleans VOWS unit were unlike any other squad we encountered. If gaining their trust was difficult – and I still had the bruises to show it – then once we’d been accepted, it was magic. Rolling with them, becoming part of the team, getting involved…it was amazing how much I got into it. It felt like I was one of them. It was only later that I fully appreciated the danger I’d been in. Before we quit the Big Easy, we hooked up with Jeff Roach again – he’d heard about our chase and he told us a story that seemed to sum it all up. ‘There was one time,’ he said, ‘we were looking for a guy wanted for second-degree murder…he was tall, like six-three, but he was slim – and we couldn’t find him anywhere in the house. So I go in the bathroom, and I don’t know how the houses are done in the UK but there was a laundry chute, where you put the laundry in and it just drops to the ground, right? And it’s like, a couple of feet wide at most, and I had holstered my gun and I was just looking at things, cabinets and whatnot, and I flicked that cabinet open and the guy was in there.’ He laughed. ‘I mean, his knees were by his face and literally you couldn’t have fit another inch in there, so I jumped back and I drew my gun, said ‘Lemme see your hands!’ and he could barely show me his hands, so we pulled him out and we got him cuffed. And after he’s out we see there was a wig in there, right? ‘And the sergeant said to me, “Lucky he didn’t have a gun!”…I moved the wig and there’s a 9mm pistol right there. If he could have moved his hand he’d have had me. I laughed then but I got home and I was like phew…I really looked in the mirror on that one, know what I mean?’ We got it loud and clear. I was lucky, I said. We shouldn’t have taken the risk. He grinned again. ‘One thing cops here say: sometimes we’re lucky – sometimes we’re good. One of our captains who was in command during Katrina: he always used to say, “It’s better to be lucky than good – but when your luck runs out you better be good.” ‘You got the guy. You did good.’ SOUTH AFRICA (#ulink_14f7969f-67d2-5ecc-8478-aaae95ca08f6) RAGING BULL: ON THE FRONT LINE WITH ANDRE STEYN Durban lies on the east coast of South Africa. The busiest port in the continent, it has a population of nearly three and a half million people, and its sandy beaches and subtropical climate have made it a popular tourist destination. But like everywhere in what they’re calling the ‘Rainbow Nation’, a new society of equality and optimism, Durban has its problems with crime. There’s not a whole lot of optimism on the streets. And there’s not too much equality either. From armed robbery and gun violence to ATM bombings and carjackings…those getting left behind by the vibrant new South Africa are taking the law into their own hands. Battling against the crime epidemic is the thin blue line of the South African Police Service – a line stretched almost to breaking point. They’re the ones desperately trying to maintain order against all the odds here; they’re the ones trying to prop up South Africa’s wholesome new image as a safe, friendly place in which to live, work and to holiday. And, right there at the sharp end, often first on the scene, is the Flying Squad, a mobile unit that deals with anything and everything that Durban’s criminals have to offer. We were embedded with Andre Steyn, an inspector with the Flying Squad – a man who knows these streets better than anyone out here…and who takes his life in his hands every time he clocks on for another shift. Back in my playing days I once said there weren’t many footballers I’d want beside me in the trenches. Well, I’d want Andre Steyn. THE MAN IN THE ORANGE TOP and baseball cap shielded his face, turning away and hunching his shoulders. He spoke in a low voice – so low that the cops surrounding him had to lean in to catch his words. We couldn’t pick up anything he was saying. The officers’ voices came through loud and clear, though. They hit him with a barrage of questions – and leading the interrogation was Inspector Andre Steyn. ‘How are we going to get into the vehicles?’ he demanded. ‘Are they locked? We don’t have a warrant to break the window. If you’re a hundred per cent sure…’ Another cop joined in. ‘Where were the guns fired? Was it outside the club? If we go into the club we are not going to get out the back.’ Steyn again: ‘What are the suspects? Coloured males? White males?’ We were in an underground car park in the centre of Durban – and something big was about to go down. It was past 10 p.m. but Steyn and his team from the Flying Squad were just getting into their stride: their informant had word that security men at a popular nightclub were carrying illegal guns. As they hit their source for details, the air crackled with restrained adrenaline, each of the officers itchy to get going, but smart enough to know that doing so unprepared would be suicide. ‘Will they give over the firearms or will they fight? What is the score?’ demanded Steyn. Finally, we picked up an audible answer. It wasn’t exactly the one we were hoping for. ‘They’re not just going to give you them like that,’ he muttered. ‘You can expect something. They can give you a fight.’ One of the squad chipped in. ‘Right,’ he said. ‘We hit the outside, then after that one of us has to go inside. Into the offices. Not into the club itself. We can maybe take him into the office, check the office, the safe and all things like that.’ There was a moment of silence, as each of the men took in the info and prepared himself for what was to follow. In the car park the strip lighting hummed and flickered, casting a weird glow over the faces of the cops, before the silence was finally broken by the man we were here to shadow. Steyn turned to us and grinned. ‘Are you coming? This may be peaceful, maybe not peaceful. It depends on how quick we hit them and how surprised they are. They want to fight? They get fucked up, bro.’ Were we coming? Are you joking? It had been a hell of a night so far…and it was just about to get a whole lot more intense. Andre Steyn has been an officer with the South African police for nearly 20 years. He’s built like a bull – squat and powerful, with a shaved head like a bullet and the forearms of a wrestler, and he’s made even more bulky and imposing by the body armour he wears the whole time we’re with him. During the day his eyes are hidden behind wraparound shades – at night, you can see they’re steely blue, unwavering, steady. And he’s under no illusions as to the dangers of his job. ‘In the Flying Squad you can get any incident,’ he told us. ‘Policemen get shot, hijackings, armed robberies, house robberies, shooting incidents…you name it, day to day. When a policeman goes to work you never know what to expect. You never know what’s over the hill. Can be armed robbery, can be a house break-in, you can get shot down. When you say goodbye to your loved ones at night, you never know if it’s the last time. ‘Because so many policemen get killed in South Africa, you live day by day. You just have to enjoy the job you do.’ He wasn’t exaggerating, either. South Africa may be known now as the Rainbow Nation, a country freshly emerged from its troubled and bloody history – but it still bears the scars of its past. For 43 years it was a state divided by the rules of apartheid: where the black population were stripped of their citizenship and denied their basic human rights. With it came oppression and violence. As civil rights leaders like Nelson Mandela and Stephen Biko were imprisoned or murdered, the population divided along ethnic and economic lines. Massive townships sprang up on the edge of the cities, becoming homes to millions of blacks and Indians who’d been forced out of ‘whites only’ areas. Without investment, facilities and often even basics like running water, they were in stark contrast to the luxurious homes of the white minority rulers. Resistance grew, however…until, finally, Nelson Mandela’s long walk to freedom in 1991 saw him released from jail and apartheid was abolished. Black and white, rich and poor: everyone was equal now. The shattered country could set about rebuilding itself. That was the idea, anyway. But if all men were now equal in the eyes of the law, the chasms which divided society for so long have proved less easy to repair. This is still a country of terrible economic inequality, and with the old barriers torn down, crime has rocketed. The end of apartheid was a new dawn for South Africa, but with it came a terrible hangover and a whole new reputation to live down. A new horror fills the lives of citizens – black and white alike: gun violence. Each day, more than 300 murders and violent attacks take place here; this country holds the dubious distinction of being the number one nation in the world for assaults, rapes and murders with firearms. In South Africa, there are 50 murders a day and every three days a cop is killed. South Africa has a population of around 47 million people – that’s six million less than the combined total of England and Wales. Yet in the same year that those two countries witnessed 757 murders, South Africa saw 18,487. Every year in this place over 100 police officers are killed in the line of duty – roughly two every week. In the UK there have been less than 100 officers killed in the last 50 years. It’s what makes being a cop here one of the most dangerous jobs in the world. And for Andre Steyn, it’s especially so. As an officer in the Flying Squad, he’s part of a rapid-response unit dealing with the worst the country has to offer – often acting on instinct, relying on a heady cocktail of training and adrenaline to get him through each shift. ‘For every policeman it’s a dangerous job, but ours is just different because we respond to situations as they happen,’ he explained. ‘Any emergency that comes through, we respond. So we’re the first vehicles standing off. You have to be ready for everything; you never know what can happen. It can spark and then you have to be ready for it.’ We were rolling with Steyn on an ordinary night in the streets of South Africa’s third city. This was to climax, it seemed, with the take-down of doormen wielding machine-guns outside a city-centre nightclub, but the hours before weren’t exactly short of incident either. And Steyn himself, we would find out, was no ordinary cop. The speed at which South Africa has transformed itself is staggering. From global outcasts, the West’s dirty little secret…to shiny, progressive tourist hotspot and World Cup hosts: and all in less than 20 years. It’s change at a breathtaking pace, a roller-coaster ride of reform and renovation. Some might say it’s happening too fast. Some parts of society just can’t keep up. And that speed, that urgency, seems to seep through everything here. To outsiders, visitors like us, the effect can be dizzying. Our night with Andre Steyn fitted the same pattern: it was breathless, non-stop, a race against time. There wasn’t a moment to take stock, there wasn’t a second to spare. We sped from one incident to another, covering everything from drink-drivers to dead bodies – and all at a tension level we didn’t experience anywhere else. Sure, we had scary moments in every place we visited: but in Durban, speeding through the streets with the Flying Squad, chasing the worst this place had to offer, we couldn’t relax for a moment. There just wasn’t time to think. Andre Steyn isn’t afraid, however. ‘It was my passion to become a policeman,’ he told us. ‘I grew up in a military family. I shot my first gun when I was five or six years old. That’s how I grew up. It’s in me.’ Steyn spent some time in the army in 1991 – the year after Nelson Mandela was freed – and in 1993 enrolled at the Police Academy in Chatsworth, a township originally created for the Indian population of Durban. ‘I was in the first white intake there – and it was like a holiday camp because we were fit from the army,’ he laughs. ‘But, yeah, they teach you the basic police work there: armed SWAT, armed driving, tactical training, computer stuff – you name it, you do it. ‘When I finally became a cop on the streets I was very excited,’ he continued. ‘Yeah, bro – you get your badge, you can’t wait to get your gun, your pistol…I just wanted to get to the job, you know? Work, work, work.’ Work, work, work. Our night with Andre Steyn was work, all right. Hard work, fast work, dangerous work. And, at least it seemed to us, work without a strategy. Maybe that was going on back at HQ, in the corridors of power – but if so, we didn’t see it. Where we were there just wasn’t time. Steyn and his partner were too busy out on the streets, dealing with it all. Steyn had got word of the meeting in the car park whilst on patrol. The informant had come forward that evening; the Flying Squad would strike that night. It’s the way things work here. When the call came through we had already been out with Steyn and his partner John Chapman for hours – and we’d seen enough action to fill a whole series of programmes. Steyn’s a pretty daunting-looking guy at the best of times: it just so happened that that particular night he was especially fired up. We watched him sign out, load up and double-check his weapons in silence, then followed as he led us into the patrol car. The last of the evening sun had turned all of Durban gold, sparkling off the high-rises and shopping centres, and as we slid smoothly along the highways it was easy to forget that we were in one of the most dangerous cities in the world. He was about to remind us just how dangerous. The night before, an ex-girlfriend of his had been the victim of a carjacking. Carjacking is one of Durban’s most common crimes – and one of its nastiest. Victims are jumped getting in or out of their vehicles, sometimes even when they’re simply waiting at traffic lights, and forced to drive to one of the townships at gunpoint. Once there, the lucky ones will be robbed and left to find their own way home. All too often, however, the victims are raped, assaulted, even murdered. Most carjackers in Durban are armed with cheap, illegal weapons, including pistols, 9mm semi-automatic machine-guns, even AK47s. In the Kwazulu Natal district, of which Durban is the capital, carjacking has grown by 40 per cent, and now more than 70 cars are hijacked every single week. With his eyes unreadable behind the wraparound shades, Steyn filled us in with the details. ‘What happened was that my ex-girlfriend got hijacked last night,’ he said, his voice clipped, short. ‘She went to pick up her son from a fitness class at the gym and a blue Corolla followed her in. Two guys wearing overalls grabbed her – she thought it was her son joking around – but they put a gun to her head, told her to jump in the back seat and they sped off with her in the car. They were driving around with her for 10 minutes before they said, look we don’t want to rape you or kill you, we just want the car and jewellery and anything else you’ve got. ‘They dropped her in Effingham, which is the north side of Durban, on the side of the road, and they gave her her phone back so she could go phone someone. Eventually a guard vehicle picked her up.’ He paused, stared out of the window at the city flashing past, one hand toying with the holster of his sidearm. ‘When I got the call that she had been hijacked and they took her with them in the vehicle, I thought, she’s a beautiful girl, long blonde hair, she’s going to get raped, shot in the head or something. And she’s got a son, a good rugby player, so I really thought, hey, what must I do now? If she gets shot I’ve got to try and find the body, you know? Not a good feeling. Thank God nothing happened.’ We asked him how he felt about it now, starting another shift. ‘It feels weird,’ he said. ‘I was very angry last night, because I’d just finished shift and you work the whole day thinking about the theft of motor vehicles, hijacking and so on, and then you just come off duty and it happens to someone you know. You get a lot of anger, yeah? ‘There was nothing she could do. She was a harmless woman – why go for a harmless female? Cowards, that’s what they are.’ He paused again, and flashed that quick grin. ‘But as I say, every dog has his day. If they must keep on hijacking, if they must keep on doing what they want, then one day they might drive into my police car…and then they are over. Know what I mean?’ As if on cue, his partner Chapman pointed silently out of the window and Steyn snapped back into cop mode. A car in front was behaving suspiciously – we watched as it jumped first one, then another red light. As we accelerated towards the vehicle, Steyn was already reading the licence plate number into his radio – though as he pointed out later, the problem with carjackings is that the victim doesn’t have time to report the car as stolen, or at least not until it’s too late. Within seconds we were hard on their bumper and Chapman gave them a flick of the siren. ‘Pull your vehicle off!’ ordered Steyn through a loudspeaker, ‘Pull off now!’ As the car slowed and parked, we were right behind them. The sun had set now, and outside there was no light other than our headlights. The occupants of the car were just silhouettes: we could see they were two men, but little more than that. Ordering us to stay put, Steyn and Chapman drew their weapons and cautiously approached. As they stalked towards the car, half-crouching, side-on, flanking the vehicle, hands steady over their guns, Steyn barked orders. ‘Switch your car off. Get out. Get out. Let me see your hands. Get out of the car NOW.’ The two men emerged, slowly, arms raised. To be fair, they looked terrified. ‘Turn around,’ they were ordered. ‘Hands on the roof.’ Both were patted down quickly, expertly, and everyone relaxed a little. But not much. ‘Why did you run two red lights?’ demanded Steyn, his weapon still drawn. ‘Where’s your driver’s licence? How much have you had to drink?’ These boys weren’t carjackers – but the driver was under the influence. This time they were let off with a slapped wrist…But none of us had ever seen a drink-driver questioned at the point of a machine-gun before. ‘A lot of policemen get shot in South Africa when they just walk up to the car,’ explained Steyn. ‘You can’t just walk up to the car and just say, “Hello sir, get out of the vehicle.” It’s totally different here. They can fire at you. They can shoot you stone dead. Before you know it, your partner’s on the ground and you can’t react. So you have to approach every car tactically. That’s how you survive.’ He wasn’t just reciting training manual theory, either. Steyn and Chapman recently chased and confronted a car containing four armed robbers. It was a chase that quickly became lethal. ‘As we approached the car the guy started firing,’ he explained. ‘The bullets hit the wall behind us, shrapnel hit our bullet-proofs. Came past us like that…unfortunately I had to shoot back at him.’ We pulled back into the Durban night-time traffic and Steyn didn’t seem about to offer any more. So…we eventually asked him what happened. ‘Oh, he was deceased,’ he shrugged. ‘The other three ran away but the next day they were found in hospital with bullet wounds.’ Конец ознакомительного фрагмента. Текст предоставлен ООО «ЛитРес». Прочитайте эту книгу целиком, купив полную легальную версию (https://www.litres.ru/vinnie-jones/world-s-toughest-cops-on-the-front-line-of-the-war-against-cr/?lfrom=688855901) на ЛитРес. Безопасно оплатить книгу можно банковской картой Visa, MasterCard, Maestro, со счета мобильного телефона, с платежного терминала, в салоне МТС или Связной, через PayPal, WebMoney, Яндекс.Деньги, QIWI Кошелек, бонусными картами или другим удобным Вам способом.