Storyville: Dogs Of War overview: Take him with a pinch of salt
Storyville: Dogs Of War (BBC4)
The best place in London to pick up a used grenade launcher and a crate of Kalashnikovs used to be Deanery Street in Mayfair, round the back of The Dorchester hotel.
That’s where the Yugoslav Directorate of Supply and Procurement had its showroom — a sort of Harrods for the discerning head of a private army. Not only was this handy for lunch at the Grill after you’d done your shopping but, if the Serbs didn’t stock the ammo you needed, billionaire arms dealer Adnan Khashoggi had his offices over the road.
Retired mercenary, gun runner and coup plotter David Tomkins was another neighbour, on the fifth floor of Grosvenor House. ‘Earned a lot of money out of here, 95 per cent of my skulduggery emanated from this building,’ he said wistfully, looking up at the windows on the documentary Storyville: Dogs Of War.
Documentary Storyville: Dogs of War investigates looks into the lives of mercenaries who made a living out of conflict. Pictured: Retired mercenary Dave Tomkins
Silhouette of military soldiers with weapons at night
Tomkins, 84 years old and suffering from bladder cancer, was setting his life story straight — though he’s no stranger to television, and one or two anecdotes have changed since the last time he went on camera.
This 90-minute film, featuring reconstructions as well as interviews and Dave’s own archive video footage, centred on a plan to assassinate Colombian cocaine mogul Pablo Escobar in 1991.
Rival gang lords wanted Tomkins to supply a fighter-bomber, to drop 500lb of explosives onto Escobar’s prison cell. But the Miami crooks selling an A-37B Dragonfly attack plane turned out to be U.S. government agents. Tomkins ended up in jail.
It’s a cautionary tale, even if it somewhat contradicts his recollections three years ago in a BBC2 documentary called Killing Escobar. In that version, the scheme ended with a helicopter crash in the Amazon jungle.
We have to accept Tomkins as an unreliable narrator, because he’s such a wickedly entertaining one. Explaining how he drew up a foolproof plan to assassinate the president of Togo, then sold the details back to the West African regime for $250,000, he admitted cheerfully, ‘The moral compass might be a bit off, if you like.’
This 90-minute film, featuring reconstructions as well as interviews and Dave’s own archive video footage, centred on a failed plan to assassinate Colombian cocaine mogul Pablo Escobar in 1991 (pictured)
Dave’s moral compass never did point anywhere but his own selfish interests. After a spell inside as a teenager for punching a copper, he taught himself to crack safes with homemade nitroglycerine. That led to a stint in Angola, laying mines during the 1970s civil war.’
I was successful and it took me into other areas of the business,’ he said, ‘all kinds of crazy things like overthrowing a country.’
Director David Whitney probed repeatedly to locate his conscience, and at first Tomkins brushed him off: ‘Yeah, I con-sidered the victims. But if I didn’t sell the weapons, somebody else would.’At last, though, deep-buried emotions seeped through. To his own surprise, he started to weep. ‘I have contributed to the deaths of people who shouldn’t have died,’ he admitted.
And then the hard man facade came back. ‘You want to portray how repentant I am. But I wouldn’t swap one day ofmy f***ing life for you or anybody else.’
