Crack House

Crack House
by Harry Keeble with Kris Hollington
Audible (audiobook)

Crack houses are just like fast-food franchises, with one major player, K, paying a senior gang member for the right to sell drugs in the area that the group controls. K employs 'an enforcer', a treasurer and runners. Lower down are the people who run the crack houses. In his mission to smash 100 crack houses in the London borough of Haringey in 1999, Detective Sergeant Harry Keeble came to know the entrepreneurs, the dealers, the transporters and the fighters deployed in emergencies such as gang wars. In the mid-1980s, when crack first appeared in Britain, Colin 'Badger' Borrows peddled the substance, started a production line, then got prostitutes hooked so they would move into his houses and work for free. Keeble describes certain British cities in ways readers would not recognise: where residents in areas run by drug 'lords' were prisoners in their own homes or unable to return to their flats because they were too scared to use the stairwells. The audiobook allows you to drift in and out of a tale that would otherwise overwhelm with its descriptions of depravation.