The Drop

when you think about it?’
    I grunted in a non-committal way that I hoped would satisfy Finney. I didn’t want to have to try and explain to him what we got out of the Drop.
    The Drop was an insurance policy. It was a bribe and a sweetener. The Drop bought influence and intelligence. It granted us permission to do business on our patch. The Drop was all of those things rolled into one and more.
    The organisation we paid had been around for a long time. It had very long arms and a big reach. It didn’t have a name and there were no accounts filed in Companies House. We paid cash and we always paid punctually, except for this last time.
    So what did we get out of it? Well for starters, if we didn’t pay they’d come after us - or at least someone else would, with their blessing. You can look at the Drop as a tax that we stumped up and if we didn’t there’d be a big queue of people willing to pay it, as long as they were allowed to take on an operation the size of ours. The Drop was a considerable amount of money but it was nowhere near the profit we made on a yearly basis. If it was, we wouldn’t pay it, simple as that. We’d take our chances on our own but we’d know there was a big outfit out there, devoting a lot of time and energy into bringing us down and we could do without that kind of conflict.
    It was not all negative though. We got a lot out of the Drop, including some priceless information. Amrein’s people had an uncanny knack of finding things out, like the name and address of a key prosecution witness in a trial for example. They could tell us if we were on the hit list of someone in authority or if we had dropped below their radar, if the police had a big investigation going on about an aspect of our business or if they were happy to leave us alone since we were the devil they knew. People don’t seem to realise that a lot of organised crime is allowed to exist because the alternative would be disorganised crime, otherwise known as complete anarchy. Police forces don’t like amateur gangsters killing each other every week over a bag of heroin. It makes their turf look lawless and their crime stats go through the roof, which means their top boy is never going to become head of Scotland Yard. Instead they prefer to allow somebody who knows the score to control and regulate a bit of illegal trade. That way nobody gets hurt, particularly innocent bystanders. The police hate it when some housewife or harmless middle manager gets their heads blown off because a drive-by went horribly wrong. They are less bothered when a known heroin dealer is found face-down in the Tyne if that’s what it takes to keep the peace. The police are like everybody really. What they want most of all is a quiet life and we try to give it to them.
    What else does the Drop provide? Influence; political and otherwise. I’m not saying that somebody goes around using our money to bribe cabinet ministers into changing the law in our favour. I’m not saying that. It’s a damn sight more subtle but it probably amounts to much the same thing.
    Here’s how it works. Amrein’s people take in a lot of money and some of it is used to make political donations to the major parties. The money doesn’t go straight from Amrein. Instead it is filtered through legitimate organisations run by some quite high-profile businessmen. People you have probably heard of. They shell out enough to get the ear of the men in government; lunch with the Party Chairman, an invite to Chequers, that sort of thing. During the course of their discussions they let slip that they might be willing to increase their funding; let’s say one hundred thousand pounds a year could be turned into a quarter of a million, if only the government would share that businessman’s sense of priorities about the area he lives in. At which point the greedy little eyes of the party chairman light up, he leans over his glass of Chassagne Montrachet and asks confidentially what these policies might be. He is then given a passionate entreaty about how the police waste their time and resources in the north east of England. Why are they chasing a couple of big time gangsters who only seem to spend their time fighting amongst themselves? When instead they could be concentrating on other, more serious matters, such as people trafficking, which we have no interest in, or cracking down on those heroin dealers on the sink estates, or burglary, which is definitely of no use to us