The Grass

Never before in the history of British crime has one man informed on such a dazzling array of the great and the bad as Michael Michael. This week, he was jailed for his part in a £132m drug-smuggling operation. Soon, however, he faces a far more daunting penalty: freedom. Steve Boggan reports

Anthony Edwards is no stranger to East End villainy, but even he was feeling twitchy yesterday. Edwards, a respected solicitor on London's Mile End Road, was about to begin negotiations that could save the life of Britain's most prolific supergrass, and, with a reputed £4m on his client's head, he didn't want to know too much.

The client is Michael Michael, a snitch so prolific he stitched up his mother, brother, wife and lover in order to avoid a 24-year sentence for running a multimillion-pound drugs empire. As name-droppers go, he was the underworld's answer to Nigel Dempster. But now, some of the names that he dropped would like to drop him. Preferably with a bullet to the back of the head.

Michael, a former accountant with a Greek-Cypriot family background, was sentenced this week to six years for smuggling £132m-worth of cannabis and cocaine into the UK. He should have received 24 years, but because he implicated 34 other crooks, who were sentenced to a total of 170 years for running 26 other drug rings, his sentence was slashed.

During a series of court cases over two years, on which strict reporting restrictions were imposed, he sang like a canary, implicating such figures as Mickey Green, Britain's most-wanted fugitive, and Kenneth Noye, the notorious gangland figure jailed for the road-rage killing of Stephen Cameron in 1996. As a result, in the parlance of the crime world, he is a dead man walking. For, far from settling down to a long stretch in custody, Michael is currently contemplating a far more alarming prospect: freedom.

Contrary to some reports, Michael has not yet actually been released, but he will be soon. When that happens, he, his wife Lynn and their two sons, aged 12 and nine, will most likely be settled abroad with new identities and possibly new appearances. They will be put under police guard for the first few years, but thereafter they will be on their own.

"Mr Michael is not yet out," says Mr Edwards, carefully weighing up the implications for his client. "But he was arrested in April 1998, so, given that you cannot be required to serve more than two thirds of your sentence, he could not be detained beyond April 2002. He is, however, eligible for parole immediately. An application may not have been lodged yet, but it will be.

"Until now," Edwards adds, "it has not been possible to discuss the arrangements for the rest of Mr Michael's life because of the various court cases. Everything has been in a state of flux. Now we can begin to make those arrangements."

As Michael's solicitor, Edwards will be in discussion with officers in the Metropolitan Police's witness-protection scheme – not an enviable role given the number of people who would like to find his client. But he knows the risks. "I always take care not to know the whereabouts," he says. "If anything is ever in writing, there'll be a gap whenever a place is mentioned. I don't want to know where they settle him, and I won't know. That is how I like it best."

Edwards' client, the man who wants to disappear, was born Constantine Michael, the son of a shoemaker, in Birmingham in 1957. The family moved to Finchley, north London, when Michael was a boy. Later he studied fashion at Southgate Technical College before taking up bookkeeping. All the evidence suggests he was a good bookkeeper, yet he never qualified. In later years, when he stood in the doorway of his home, wasted on cocaine and holding a 9mm pistol while Customs officers surrounded him, he was to rue his meticulousness. For it was that that was to bring about his downfall.

Michael's road to ruin began in 1989 when, in return for a reduced sentence for a failed mortgage fraud, he agreed to become a registered police informant. Ordinarily, that might have led to nothing, but, after two failed marriages, Michael met his current partner, Lynn, who was involved in the underworld through her chosen occupation in the vice trade. Together, she and Michael set up a string of "saunas" in north London, which netted them substantial profits of around £500,000 a year.

According to Michael's own version, he then met the infamous Mickey Green – through Lynn, who had gone to school with Green's son. Green, now 59, is one of Scotland Yard's most wanted men, a criminal who was first jailed for armed robbery in 1970 and who is still wanted for questioning over the death of a taxi driver in Ireland in 1993. He has been on the run for a decade because of his drugs connections. Michael claims that he was sucked into Green's world and, as a result, began trafficking in cannabis supplied by Green in Spain.

It didn't stop there. Michael told Customs investigators that Green was not his only entrée into the drugs world; he says that his police "handler", Detective Constable Paul Carpenter, made it easy for him, passing him information in return for £10,000 a week. Carpenter, who denies the claims, has been investigated by Scotland Yard and cleared of corruption, but he remains suspended. Michael continues to insist that after he became involved in the importation of cannabis, Carpenter urged him to get into the yet more lucrative trade in cocaine.

The good times rolled. It seemed easy. And the money, tens of millions of pounds, flowed in. According to Michael's records, between 1994 and 1998, 19,000kg of cannabis and 110kg of cocaine were brought into the country by his network. At one point, drugs were hidden in trucks used by M&S. A tourist coach – known by the smugglers as "the fun bus" – was fitted out with hidden compartments. While being driven through Customs, the tourists had no idea they were sitting on millions of pounds worth of drugs.

Michael continued to pass information to his handler while running his drugs operation. He claimed the information he received from Carpenter enabled him to avoid detection, but he was to reckon without Customs and Excise investigators. In April 1998, during a routine surveillance operation, his cover was blown. In an industrial unit in Hatfield, Hertfordshire, members of his gang were caught red-handed unloading an extraordinary cargo: 16kg of cocaine and 2,900kg of cannabis.

When unarmed Customs men went to Michael's £750,000 home in Radlett, Hertfordshire, he seemed resigned to his fate. According to some sources, a steadily growing cocaine habit had already got the better of him; he had become sloppy. In any case, he put up no resistance. "He had a gun in his hand, but there was no indication that he would use it," says one Customs official. "He took it back inside the house and hid it behind his wardrobe. Then he began to co-operate – and he never really stopped."

Inside Michael's house, the investigators were staggered at what they found: a room for storing money, a money-counting machine, £800,000 in cash, the gun and, to their utter delight, precise and detailed records of all his drug deals.

"We had absolutely everything – all the evidence we could want," the Customs source says. "There was never a question of him being obstructive. He just talked and talked. He named names we knew about and some we didn't know about. There were 250 hours of taped interviews during which he told us all he could."

He told them about the suppliers, the traffickers, the smugglers, the money-launderers, and the "money-mules" who strapped up to £200,000 a time to their bodies in order to get it out of the country. Among these was Tracy Kirby, a former Page 3 girl who used the proceeds on cosmetic surgery. She was sentenced to three years in prison.

He told them about his mother, 62-year-old Maria, who had played only a minor role and was never charged. He told them about his wife, Lynn, who also became a grass and was given a two-year suspended jail sentence for her role in the operation. He told them about his lover, Sue Richards, who was sent to prison for 12 months. And he told them about his brother, Xanthos, who was jailed for four and a half years for carrying up to £80m across the English Channel to Michael's associates.

Worst of all, he told them about Mickey Green, claiming he was a supplier. "We tried to extradite Green, but after two cases against other people implicated by Michael collapsed, we realised we would have to review our position," the Customs source says. "The Treasury counsel pointed out that the jury hadn't believed Michael; it was his word against Green's, and that wasn't enough."

The case against Green was dropped, leaving him free to ponder the fate of Michael. Some say Green is still in Spain, others in South America – or northern Cyprus, where there are no extradition treaties with the UK. Michael had better hope that they do not bump into each other in the same hiding-place.

So that was the end of the prosecutions that Her Majesty's Customs and Excise could not believe had fallen into its lap. All that remained was for Michael to be sentenced, and for Anthony Edwards to begin making arrangements for the rest of his client's life. But what does that life have in store for Michael? "Death," says Mr Edwards unequivocally. "It is a very real risk, one that Mr Michael will have to face for the rest of his life. And the chances of someone trying to kill him are high. Extremely high indeed."

Additional reporting by Paul Lashmar