Crime

It was when I saw an entire crate of orange juice exit my local supermarket that I knew something had died. The Artful Dodger school of shoplifting has officially been boarded up, its artisan poachers and pilferers as redundant to the modern world of thieving as swag bags, eye masks and soft sole shoes.  There’s no longer any attempt at discretion or skill when it comes to shoplifting in my nearest Co-op in south London. The thieves don’t enter in trench coats and furtively peruse the aisles. They stroll in, take as much as they can carry and walk out again, knowing that the worst punishment they face is being given some scatological invective from the five-foot-nothing woman of venerable age who is usually locked inside her till cubicle.

Usually when I start listening to a true-life podcast, I don’t know how it ends. That’s not the case with The Smuggler, BBC Radio 4’s new investigation into people smuggling. Across ten episodes, its Orwell Prize-winning presenter, Annabel Deas, tells the story of ‘Nick’, on the face of it an unlikely protagonist. Nick is white, English and a former soldier in the British Army. He’s also a friend of mine. We met in jail in 2021 and have stayed in contact ever since. So I know Nick’s story. I even know how it ends. Despite all this, I found myself absolutely gripped by The Smuggler. This is partly because it’s such a fascinating, and timely, topic. Migration is rarely out of the news. Keir Starmer keeps promising to ‘smash the gangs’ and ‘stop the boats’.

A Sunday morning in Bethnal Green and Adam, who has been leading Kray-themed walking tours of the neighbourhood for almost two decades, corrals a congregation of eight polite, reserved, attentive customers who, with sensible rucksacks, floor-length M&S skirts, reusable water bottles and neutral-coloured, thin-laced trainers, look as far removed from pool hall brawls and basement flat stabbings as it’s possible to get without joining the Church Army or taking up cribbage. When he started giving tours of the Kray twins’ haunts, Adam tells us, it was impossible to go more than five minutes without some tipsy ageing derelict lurching out of the Blind Beggar pub to inform the group that he ‘knew the Krays personally’.

I'm in the tiny riverside town of Virpazar, in the little Balkan country of Montenegro; and under the white geisha face of a late summer moon I am warily ordering the celebrated local delicacy. It is carp — caught from the nearby, slivovitz-clear waters of Lake Skadar (biggest lake in the Balkans!). But what makes me wary is the preparation. The carp is apparently marinated, and served cold, with boiled potatoes and greens. Cold slimy fish with hot spuds and spinach? It sounds like some nightmare culinary “specialty” from the old communist bloc (of which Montenegro was once a part, within Yugoslavia). I’m veteran enough to remember a few of these. “Famous” flatbreads that came with rancid lard.