‘Of course I used to be violent, Jan… however I’ve by no means murdered anybody’: JAN MOIR has an eye-popping encounter with Britain’s reply to Pablo Escobar

Andrew Pritchard lives in a modest terraced house in east London with a baby playpen in the front room next to a startling wall of art, including a portrait of dead rapper Biggie Smalls, a pair of prints by the Mexican artist Frida Kahlo and a blood-red crucifixion scene. ‘I love art,’ he says, happy with his choices.

He bought these pictures on various travels around Cuba, Honduras, Dominica, Jamaica and Holland. What was he doing there?

Pritchard was once one of the biggest drug traffickers in Britain, our very own homegrown drug lord to rival Colombia’s Pablo Escobar or Mexico’s El Chapo.

‘Actually,’ he says, pointing to the Kahlos, ‘El Chapo gave me those before he was arrested.’ Then he laughs. ‘Nah, I’m only kidding.’

But is he? Is he? Today, Pritchard is the very picture of suburban respectability. He sits at the dining table looking smart in his polo shirt and dad-jeans. He has a freshly shaved face, bullish shoulders, a thick Rolex on his wrist and is charmingly keen to make a good impression; lots of eye contact, lots of first-name usage, lots of scented candles perfuming the air, lots of fussing about tending to his giant tank of tropical malawi cichlid fish and also to his guests. ‘Coffee, tea?’ he asks politely, after providing a Hackney Council visitor parking permit for my car. So thoughtful!

It is hard to believe this is the same man who, as a career criminal, shipped tons of cocaine and cannabis into Britain over a 30-year period and was once known as the ‘King of the Rave’ due to his efficiency at smuggling ecstasy on to these shores at the rate of 500,000 tablets a month.

He was so powerful, he claims, that he evaded security checks by bribing customs officers to switch off their X-ray machines while his illicit goods sailed through, as innocent as Trunkis.

Part East End wide boy, part charming rogue, Pritchard was ingenious, energetic, imaginative, good at being a villain. Really good at it.

He smuggled the ecstasy from Holland in boxes of salad potatoes; he decanted gallons of liquid cocaine into rum bottles and got it through customs that way.

Via the British High Commission in Jamaica, he once got permission to repatriate an imaginary friend’s body to England. A death certificate was issued, a coffin was purchased – but instead of a corpse, it was filled with what Pritchard describes as ‘90 kilos of Jamaica’s finest’.

At the height of his powers he was living in a mansion on the Caribbean island, married to a Miss World contestant and running a global business worth millions – although he finds it hard to put an exact figure on his peak wealth as a narco-smuggler. Well, I ask, what was the most you ever had in the bank?

‘First of all, Jan, it wasn’t in the bank.’

Right. Of course it wasn’t.

‘I had different assets, several million, maybe £10 million, £15 million, laid across land and homes. And I was always washing money, investing in every hare-brained business scheme going because you had to do something with the cash. But of course, when you get caught, they take it all away from you. And you always get caught in the end.’

After slipping under the radar for years, Pritchard was arrested in 2004, aged 38, after the largest drug bust in British history.

On a December morning, more than half a ton of cocaine, worth over £100 million, was seized at Spitalfields Market in east London, concealed in a shipment of coconuts from Guyana. Remarkably, Pritchard was acquitted after two trials – his defence was that he was smuggling cigars, not drugs – and the whole episode was so astonishing that television journalist Donal MacIntyre made a documentary about it called Cocaine And Coconuts.

Afterwards, Pritchard went straight back to smuggling.

In 2013, then aged 47, he was caught driving around Dagenham with £1 million worth of cocaine stashed in plastic carrier bags in his car boot. Following a chase in which he tried to force a police car off the road, and a trial at Woolwich Crown Court, he was sentenced to 15 years.

Released on appeal in 2019, he changed his ways.

During his last stint in prison Pritchard tried to better himself, to seek out courses to address his behavioural problems, to progress through the system in a positive way. Yet all he was offered was a course on money management. ‘I was an international drug trafficker,’ he sighs. ‘I made a lot of money, and I was good at managing it.’

He says this in the same patient, stating-the-bleeding-obvious manner as when I asked him if he had ever been violent. ‘Of course I was violent, Jan. You can’t be involved in a business like that and not be able to enforce what you’re doing. So yes, I’ve carried out acts of violence myself.

‘But it’s the life that you are in. If someone runs off with something, you can’t just let them go.’

Again, he has his own code of honour. ‘I never murdered anyone, nor had anyone murdered. Killing someone is a road you can never go back from. I learned very early on that one drop of blood costs more than 100 kilos of cocaine, because the police will never stop.

‘Yes, sometimes people get quite badly beaten with hammers and all kinds of stuff – I’m not going to dispute that – but taking someone’s life, no. Biblically and socially it just doesn’t make sense.’

Glad we got that moral dilemma cleared up!

Pritchard now campaigns for prisoner rehabilitation and for at-risk youth, begging them not to make the same mistakes that he did. To this end he has started a charitable foundation, gives talks in prisons and schools, has developed workshops and courses, makes advisory films for YouTube and has written a cautionary autobiography called Empire Of Dirt about his three decades in the drugs trade.

The title is taken from the song Hurt by the rock band Nine Inch Nails – also recorded in a critically acclaimed cover by Johnny Cash. ‘You could have it all, my empire of dirt,’ is the haunting lyric of this bleak reflection on pain, addiction and the folly of wasted lives.

So what is his message to young men tempted to join postcode gangs or dabble in the drug racket?

‘That it will always end badly, it will always end in jail or death. Kids see this gleaming glamour, a successful drug dealer with a nice watch, a nice car and a pretty girlfriend. But within the first two years of being in prison, the car’s gone and so has the watch, and the girlfriend will be gone not long after that. That’s the reality.’

But you still have a nice watch, I note. ‘Yes, I still like nice things. This is a £15,000 Rolex – but Jan, I used to have a £150,000 Rolex.’

He lives in this house bought in 1961 for £1,600 by his parents, who ran an off licence and would sometimes store – how can I put this? – goods in transit in their shop basement.

He seems to be doing OK. His Mercedes is parked nearby.

‘But it’s not a Bentley,’ he protests, worried that this might seem too flash. ‘I don’t want any of these kids to think there is a golden parachute at the end of the rainbow, because there isn’t.’

Still, there can hardly be a better deterrent to a life of crime than the chapters in his book which describe the clammy horror of his various incarcerations, including one spell in a stinking Jamaican jail with 30 men to a cell.

‘I’d rather do five years in a British prison than five months there,’ he says. When an inmate in for murder steals his trainers on the first day, Pritchard responds by filling his socks with rocks, following him into the shower, giving him a headbutt followed by a battering with the sock cosh. ‘I couldn’t have lived with myself if I let it go,’ he writes in his book.

Including spells in youth custody, time on remand and long periods as a category A prisoner in places such as HMP Belmarsh, HMP Wandsworth and then through the dispersal jail system, Pritchard has spent nearly a decade behind bars. ‘I haven’t spent a full ten years, but I’ve done ten Christmases in jail. That is how I count it,’ he says.

He writes of how Islam is a problem in British prisons, with sharia courts operating freely, bloody punishment whippings with television cables being meted out on a regular basis and scared young men encouraged to adopt the Muslim faith to protect them from gang violence.

Overcrowding is a problem. Drugs are a problem. Nutters are a perennial problem in an environment where inmates must learn how to deal with ‘a lot of extremely unbalanced people’ on a daily basis.

‘You’re living with psychopaths. You’re thinking, I’ve got 1,500 years in sentences just on this landing. You’ve got serial killers. You’ve got the lot.’

The recent HMP Frankland murder of Soham killer Ian Huntley did not escape Pritchard’s attention. ‘What Huntley did was a despicable crime. And to be completely honest with you, I wish I’d killed him myself.

‘But the guy who is alleged to have killed him had also committed terrible crimes. He is a scumbag himself. So I don’t admire him either.’

Pritchard is at least honest about his own crimes and the carnage he has caused.

‘My crimes were devastating. I destroyed millions of lives, I admit it. I can’t change that. They say a leopard can’t change its spots, but it can change its mind.

‘I saw so many young people around that prison yard doing huge sentences, their lives wasted, pointless. And I thought: I’m responsible for a lot of this.

‘I never took into consideration that my actions had an effect.’

Most criminals don’t, apparently. ‘We never account for our actions. As criminals, what we tend to do is feel sorry for ourselves when we get caught.’

While taking full responsibility for his crimes, Pritchard still cannot resist seeding a little crop of mitigating circumstances.

In his memoir he writes of a previously undiagnosed ADHD and dyslexia, of growing up mixed-race – his mother was Jamaican, his father a white Cockney – and being negatively affected by the ‘hostility’ of the Metropolitan police (but he was running a narcotics empire, after all).

‘Look, I’m no victim. I was privileged, really. My parents were wonderful, decent people. They didn’t beat me. I didn’t want for food. I did what I did because I was a little bastard.’

The great irony is that Andrew Pritchard would have been a big success had he not been such a successful drug trafficker. His day job was working as a music promoter – he put on sound shows, wildly popular acid-house raves and staged the iconic Reggae Sunsplash festival. He could have been a contender, but he chose a different route to riches as he tilled the soil in his own empire of dirt.

Today he has four children by four different mothers – two grown-up sons who live respectable lives in Miami, a schoolboy son who lives in London and a two-year-old daughter called Ava, who lives here with Pritchard and Lindsey, the Cypriot girlfriend he met in 2021.

‘I never expected to fall in love again and have another child, but here we are,’ he says.

Getting to know her family was a problem, especially after her grandmother spotted Andrew in a Channel 5 documentary about HMP Belmarsh and learned of his past. ‘She was crying, asking Lindsey if I’d ever asked her to carry anything back from holiday,’ he says. ‘I mean, I brought it over in shipping containers, not in some little handbag.’

Seven years after leaving prison, old habits still die hard. ‘I can lock myself up from everything mentally. People

are talking. I should be saying things, but I’m used to being in a cell block with hundreds of people banging and shouting so I had to learn to be emotionless.

‘It makes Lindsey angry. And I still rush my food like a slob. In prison, you don’t sit and enjoy food at the table. Everything is a rush because you’re always expecting the worst.’

For him, surely the worst is over. ‘Yes. I don’t fear the police kicking down my front door any more. In the morning, when I hear the door, it’s the Amazon man, not a hitman. And for the first time I’m at home with my child and it is marvellous. Before I was always in prison or on the run. I missed it all.’

Behind him, the bright lights inside the tropical fish tank have broken, leaving his shoal of arowanas to flit around in a Stygian gloom. They are predators that killed all the other breeds in the tank and now reign supreme, although condemned to move silently in the shadows.

If one were looking for a metaphor for Andrew Pritchard’s phantom life of darkness and then daylight, of freedom and captivity, then here it is, in all its watery glory. The miracle is that he is not sleeping with the fishes, himself, amen.

Empire Of Dirt is available at all major book stores.