Jack was "13, or maybe a young 14" and dealing drugs in London when he sensed that something was about to go wrong. He was in a car, with a friend and an 18-year-old girl he had paid to drive them because he was way too young to have a licence. The buyer – a friend of a friend – arrived with a group of men in another car. He was a new customer, older and bigger than Jack's usual schoolboy clients, and Jack immediately felt that there was something "dodge" about him. "I said, 'Come on your own,' but he was moving a bit funny. He didn't want to shut the car door fully."
The guy had agreed to pay £300 (about NZ$580) for a bag of marijuana and Jack told his teenage accomplice to count the money before giving him the drugs. But the friend was "scared – he's shook", so he handed over the drugs without checking the notes and it was not until the buyer had driven away that they realised the pile of cash was £100 short. "We didn't know at the time it was all fake notes as well," Jack says.
As a young dealer building his reputation, Jack knew he couldn't let someone get away with ripping him off. This was a big "shot" – deal – for him so he had come prepared.
"I had borrowed this fat machete off my olders. It was big, from my nipple to my knee," he says. "I realised we'd been bumped, so I told the girl to do a U-turn and pull up behind them. I got out the machete and started hanging out of the window, swinging it. But I'm a youth. I'm stunted. I didn't want to actually stab them. I didn't have the balls. I was hoping that they were going to freeze up as soon as they saw me swinging the machete, but this lot were pretty serious. They didn't get scared; they started pulling out knives. I'm shitting myself, but I want the money."
In the end he told the girl to drive away. "I'm just young. I didn't know what to do. I'm not a violent guy. I wasn't ready to get into a knife fight over £100."
This is a story about how a middle-class boy from a leafy suburb of London ended up as a teenage drug dealer, who claims he was making £10,000 a month. Jack grew up in a comfortable three-bedroom house with a garden, learning the piano, taking judo lessons and going on family holidays to Australia, America and Greece. Then he started smoking marijuana at 13, began bunking off school and ended up hanging out in crack dens.
His mother, Emma, the finance manager of a charity, had no idea of the violent underworld on her doorstep until her son got dragged into it. She sits calmly beside Jack as he talks about his life of crime, then vividly describes the horror of watching him go off the rails. "Jack is a schoolboy while all this is happening. Me and his dad, night after night, would follow him to these trap houses [drug dens]. We would be sitting in the car, looking in the window. We could see him with grown men smoking, and we were just watching him, waiting until he came out and came home again, because we were so worried." She felt helpless as she tried to save her son.
"We'd check his room and find massive knives," Emma says. "Every time we found a knife we'd take it away. We would take him to the police station or try to get the police to track Jack, try to give them information about these people that had been teaching Jack how to be a drug dealer. At the same time, he was getting into trouble at school. I could see that there was something much more powerful in his life that was controlling him and taking all his energy. He wouldn't get any sleep because he was doing all this stuff in the night. It was this powerful thing that we weren't able to protect Jack from. It just overtook him."
I meet Jack and Emma in a youth centre around the corner from the artisan bakeries, gastropubs and organic butchers that characterise their neighbourhood. Jack is wearing a grey sweatshirt, with the hood up. Emma is dressed in a knee-length navy skirt and loafers. They are clearly close and protective of one another, but for much of the past five years they have existed in parallel universes even when living under one roof.
Jack, who is now 18, has been arrested multiple times and developed a reputation as a "ringleader" for criminal activity in the area – although he has never been convicted of any drug offences. He talks with bravado about his life "on the roads" and insists he was always in control. "I've never done a thing I didn't want to. Can I make my own decisions or am I some sort of programmable robot?"
But Emma believes he was manipulated by older men into dealing drugs. "He's talking about these things like you'd imagine a man to be doing, but he was a 13-year-old boy with a machete. They big you up and they make you feel good. Jack didn't get that at school. All he got was, 'You're not behaving properly. We're going to reject you, send you to a pupil referral unit. You're going to sit in a room on your own.' So I can see why Jack was attracted to these people. He found something he was really good at, and he found people who appreciated him for things that he was doing. There's all this bravado but he's insecure."
Jack is smart – "worldly wise", his mum says – with a work ethic and an entrepreneurial spirit, but he has severe dyslexia and ADHD, which meant he struggled right from the start. "I really hated school. When I was young, I would cry," he says. "I was put in the stupid people class. I just never felt as if I fitted in."
By the time he was 15, his attendance was down to 20 per cent and he had been repeatedly suspended. There was also domestic abuse in the family. Emma was the victim of coercive control and is now divorced. Jack's father was sometimes violent to his son. When he was 16, Jack was thrown out by his dad and spent several months sleeping on friends' sofas and in crack dens. "I was in debt to some dealers as well – owed about a grand – so it was a bit jarring," he says, which must be an understatement.
"I remember when I was younger I always had this desire for money and riches, a capitalist mindset. I always wanted more, even though I had so much. The house we lived in was lovely; we had nice holidays. It wasn't like we were poor, but I wanted to be wealthy."
By the age of 12, Jack was regularly breaking the law. "The first thing I did that was illegal – and actually I wish I had stuck to it – was graffiti. I used to steal spray paint cans. I looked so young that they didn't clock me." He used a Waterstones bag. "I got 10 books, cut the middle out of 8 of them, stuck them together and wrapped foil around the inside, so the sensor can't detect them. The security guard would just see a bag of books."
Then things took a darker turn. "Around the same time everyone started to smoke, so this is when the drugs come in. When I was 13, I started shotting [selling] with a guy that I knew from primary school. There was one guy in my school who did loans – that was his hustle. He loaned me £60. I had to pay him back £80, so I went out and bought a Q [a quarter ounce of weed]. I bought scales and baggies and that was my business."
The experienced dealer who sold him the marijuana was thrilled to have a new recruit to his army of pushers. "Every person that starts selling opens up a new market," says Jack. "He's not going to be selling to my friends in our year at school." Slowly, the older man reeled Jack in, encouraging him and his friend to sell more and more drugs. "They hype you up. When you pick up they'd be, 'Yes, bruv. You two are mashing it, bro.' Me and this guy got from a Q to nine ounces in a year. At one point, we had to step down – we were getting too many people trying to rob us. We were grabbing half a kilo at 14."
While his classmates were carrying around school books in their rucksacks, Jack was transporting drugs worth thousands of pounds – "Half a box, that's two and a bit grand." The suppliers made sure to step up the praise as his sales increased. "They'd say, 'None of the youngers are moving like you lot.' And you're thinking, 'Oh yes, the olders are rating me.' " He was offered protection. "They will tell you, 'Listen, you're grabbing off us. If you've got any problems, we'll sort them out for you.' Who you know determines who will come at you. It's all just a weird chess game like that."
'It was good business for me'
Jack saw a friend stabbed in front of him and on another occasion was mugged by five men. "It was nothing personal: I was working for another guy and they were just robbing me to get through to him." He saw his time running drugs for an older dealer as "work experience. It showed me how to operate a business, how to stay low-key, how not to get on others' toes." Eventually, Jack set up on his own. "I knew the money he was making."
The teenager became the "weed guy" for the older dealers. "When I was 13, I took mad risks. They were all selling hard food – crack and heroin. I'd be sitting in the bando [drug house] with them while they've got all this crack, all this heroin. It was good business for me. Because they're making so much money, they're stressed out. They're living mad lives; they need to smoke their weed. So I'd be going bando to bando." The older dealers were always trying to get him to "move up" and sell hard drugs, but Jack says he refused: "Hard food is too much risk for not enough reward."
Once some rivals chased him in a Mercedes while Jack was on his bike. "I skirted on the pavement so they couldn't run me over, but they just pulled up ahead of me. I did a front flip off the bike, went headfirst into a wall, and for a second I was just lying on the ground looking up." Then he saw one of the gang pulling out a knife. "I was thinking, 'This is it. Finally, I'm going to know what it feels like to get stabbed.' But then the reactions kicked in, I hopped up and started running for my life. There was a footbridge over the train track and I dashed over that, because they're with the Mercedes – they can't leave it. And the one youth doesn't want to chase me on his own; they need two on one."
He went out on county lines, taking a cab to Aldershot to sell drugs with an older dealer. They stayed with two female crack addicts – "cuckooing". Jack thinks in some ways he was lucky. "I hopped in just before all the drill music and all the hype, and it became so popular and so fashionable to do it. Now the whole culture of it has influenced a lot of these kids... Everyone wants the new Gucci coat. The drill music is twisting kids' heads – they think it's cool to go and stab someone. I've never thought that in my life."
Family home raided
Emma finds it difficult to listen to her son's account. It was an "incredibly hard time for our whole family", she says. "We got raided a lot of times, and because it was a child's bedroom, I'd be there and the police would be looking through and finding stuff. There would be piles of money, scales and baggies and then kids' book on the shelves. There was a really strange juxtaposition between the two worlds and I held on to what I thought Jack's world should be for a very long time."
She admits that part of her wanted to pretend it wasn't happening. "If we found a massive knife in his room, we'd just get rid of it. We would chuck it away and then he'd accumulate all the drug stuff again. You try to get him to go to school, where you feel he will be safe – and then he stopped going to school. And you've still got to go to work, because otherwise you can't keep the money coming in. There were many people from social services that we saw. None of it helped."
Slowly the pressure of being constantly on edge got to Jack. "Two years ago, when everyone was getting raided, I couldn't sleep." He became increasingly paranoid and left his window open at night, with an escape route planned across the roof. "Every little noise, like the bin rattles from the foxes, I was up. Before I fell asleep, I would hop out of bed 10, 15 times. It was mentally draining."
Friends were convicted of drug offences and got long sentences. Jack started to wonder whether there was another way. "I'm a bit more screwed on than others who have gone down the same path as me. Everyone lives in the moment. I was thinking about the future."
Turning point
Last year, he was referred to the charity Shift, which works to tackle knife crime. With the help of Chris Roach – a mix of mentor, counsellor, life coach and father figure – he's turning his life around. In the past, Jack had to deal with up to a dozen people, including social services, health, education, welfare and the police. "The social workers are just ticking boxes," he says. Shift makes sure that there is a single point of contact to do "whatever it takes" to break the vicious cycle of crime.
Chris meets regularly with Jack and has helped him with everything from applying for jobs to going to court, as well as giving emotional support. "I'm there whether there is a crisis or not," says Chris. "The social workers will only turn up if something's happened. I'm still there if nothing's happened. I meet up with Jack, we go for lunch, we check in with each other. I'm still a professional but it's relaxed. If Jack calls me later this evening, I'll speak to him. It's working in a way where the young person respects me, being open and honest, but I've been transparent from day one: if he does something wrong, I tell him."
It seems to work. Jack now has a job in a restaurant and office clearance work. Two thirds of the young people who have been taken on by Shift have been offence-free since the charity got involved in their lives. Many of the young people who were out of education have gone back to school.
Criminal exploitation is morally complicated – perpetrators are often also victims. When it costs more to send someone to a young offender's institute than to Eton, it is a false economy not to throw everything at trying to divert children away from crime. An economic analysis of Shift's work found that every £1 spent on the charity generated savings to the taxpayer of £8 over 5 years and £33 over 20 years. In some cases, breaking the cycle of crime for one child could save £2.5 million. And this does not take account of the human cost of knife crime, gangs and drugs.
Shift only operates in two parts of London but it has been promised government funding to start projects in Middlesbrough, Grimsby and Blackpool. Last month, Michael Gove, the former communities secretary, described its work as "an exemplar of what levelling up should really mean".
According to the Department for Education, there are more than 12,000 children who are at risk of exploitation by gangs. Last year, 30 children were stabbed to death in London alone. There has been a 30 per cent increase in knife crime over the past decade and a 12 per cent increase in hospital admissions for stabbings in five years. Youth workers and the police report that in some cases children as young as 10 are getting dragged into gangs or county lines.
Jack sounds almost nonchalant about the world he is trying to leave behind. "At some point, you've got to grow up," he says. "I just got sick of the other life." Chris sees it rather differently. "Jack will say, 'I wasn't a victim,' but that's self-preservation," he says. "Of course they are victims. They are children. That's what people forget."
• Some names have been changed
Written by: Rachel Sylvester
© The Times of London