'I was a top UK cocaine smuggler and I think Top Boy is completely ridiculous'

Metro

5 hours ago

When you've lived a life 'comfortably in the top 1% of cocaine smugglers', watching the drug trade play out on the small screen can make the flaws hard to ignore.
Take Ronan Bennett's Top Boy, which was touted as a realistic portrayal of life on a Hackney council estate with the 'shotting' (selling), 'food' (drugs) and 'Ps' (cash) in the mix. Yet reformed drug smuggler Andrew Pritchard, 58, says elements are 'completely ridiculous' and 'exaggerated'.
Pritchard hails from Hackney and Stoke Newington and so knows a lot of the cast of the Netflix show. 'It's so far from the mark it's unreal,' he tells the Metro.
He says shows like it 'raise the bar with kids' for what they might expect from a life in London's criminal underworld. 'They think it's normal to go and shoot and spray people,' he said. 'They don't realise that one drop of blood costs more than 100 kilos of cocaine. The minute you put blood on the street, the police are all over you.'
If you're in the market for the more genuine article, Pritchard recommends This City Is Ours on the BBC.
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The way he tells it, his own story is ripe for screen adaptation – and he would undoubtedly be a stickler for authenticity. Retreading his own misspent youth is part of what he does now with The AP Foundation, giving young offenders a glimpse into the life of a top drug smuggler; one that was a thrilling, addictive ride but that hurt people and ended with 15 years in prison.
By the time Prtichard was 21, it was the height of the 1980s house party craze, and he was behind some of the largest illegal warehouse raves in the country. The guest lists weren't anything to be sniffed at either, with Pritchard reeling off names like Milli Vanilli, Boy George and the Pet Shop Boys.
It was through these parties that he also became 'open to the criminal elements' and started to build an elaborate drug smuggling operation, spanning Europe and the Caribbean, where his mother arrived in the UK from as part of the Windrush generation.
As Pritchard details in the new Sky docu-series Amsterdam Narcos, first came ecstasy, then cocaine. To be more specific, 'vast' amounts of ecstasy, which wound its way into clubs and venues. He used friends at the fruit markets in New Covent Garden and New Spitalfields to get the stuff over from Holland – where the round design-stamped pills was booming.
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'Holland was a very big exporter of apples and potatoes,' Pritchard explains, speaking rapid-fire, because he knows this inside-out. 'But apples were a really good choice because of the boxes they come in. They had different crates on them and also they were quite heavy.
'So what I discovered was that if we could simply place a bulk of ecstasy at the bottom of each crate, and obviously put trays of apples above them, they were quite a good transport. They were perishable goods so they would come through customs very quickly.'
The Sky docu-series gets into this, but it's staggering to hear the number of places you can hide drugs in transit. 'Places you possibly couldn't imagine,' says Pritchard. 'We had them everywhere from the nose of the plane to the cargo bins.
'Everywhere you could imagine, on a ship, plane or passenger, we hid drugs.'
With drugs, violence inevitably follows. Pritchard doesn't shy away from the brutality, describing people he's seen 'shot in the head, put in the boot of a car and set fire to'. But there was never any point in having a security team, he says, because 'the kind of people you deal with will just drive by and spray everyone'.
'You're your own security. It's how you do business with people,' he explains. 'You have to become a person they can't afford to lose in that chain, because a lot of people rely on you, so they wrap you in cotton wool.'
He says that was his 'protection blanket', alongside a good deal of luck.
When a close call forced Pritchard to flee to Jamaica, with the help of extended family on his mother's side, he moved into cocaine. In the noughties, an estimated 20% of the cocaine in Britain came through Jamaica. Pritchard's contact book was stuffed: people on the wharfs, docks, planes, from Montego Bay into Schiphol Airport, to Heathrow and Gatwick.
So how much money was he making? That, he's less candid about. 'It's very difficult to put a button figure on it,' he says. 'Turning over hundreds of millions, yes, but what you could actually say you may have at some point received would be a different figure altogether.'
As with every great crime drama, from Goodfellas to Scarface, there's always the third act looming, when it's time to pay the piper. Pritchard's arrived in 2015, when he was sent down to Belmarsh.
But since he was released and set up his charity to help young offenders, Pritchard's life has been a series of 'surreal' moments. Including attending a knife crime conference at the Old Bailey, only to meet the judge who sentenced him.
When the judge, no longer wearing his wig and gown, started to apologise for issuing such a lengthy sentence, Pritchard stopped him.
'Don't apologise, I said, because you changed my life. If I hadn't put in that time and come to my senses, I would be here in front of you in handcuffs again, not sitting here advising kids why not to live this lifestyle,' he told the judge.
Prtichard has even brought in a number of fellow reformed offenders to help with his foundation, including Stephen Mee (former drug lord turned artist) and Kenneth Noye (of the Brink's Mat heist, or Jack Lowden's real-life character in The Gold, for TV fans). More Trending
'They know what it's like to sit in prison for 30 odd years and watch people you love die while you're wasting away,' says Pritchard. Now their role is to tell those at the start of a life of criminality that it isn't all it's cracked up to be in shows like Top Boy and Gangs of London.
'You have to tell them the truth, tell them what it is. It seems glorious. And I'll say to you, yes, it's glorious in parts.
'There's two sides to this coin, but when it flips, that other side is not a nice side.'
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Amsterdam Narcos airs 13 August on Sky Documentaries and streaming service NOW .
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