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Beru Tessema (Miruts) and Kurt Egyiawan (Salim) in the Globe Theatre production of The Frontline |
Exposing the real deal
You’ll have seen Amar dealing drugs round Camden Tube. But he’d really rather be a farmer back in Ethiopia.
He went with Simon Wroe to see Frontline, a play at the Globe that
depicts the ‘Hogarthian insanity’ around the station. Amar gave his verdict on the production and talked about
life with the drugs gang
AMAR has sold drugs on the streets of Camden Town since he was 15 years old. You’ve probably seen him or his friends: teenagers from Ethiopia, Eritrea and Somalia, all cloaked in hoods and caps, loitering with intent beside the Lock or the Underground. They are brazen in their dealings, offering anyone who passes “skunk” or “weed” in loud stage whispers.
Police know them as the gang TMS, an abbreviation for The Money Squad.
While Amar and his mates might hardly be an organised criminal network, they have allegedly instigated enough drunken disturbances and turf-related violence over the past three years for the Met to apply for Asbos on 14 of the “gang members”. If the request to ban them from the borough is successful, it will be the largest group anti-social behaviour order in Camden’s history.
The courts are yet to decide the fate of Amar, but the 18-year-old is already bearing the brunt of any potential ruling. Reporting restrictions forbid any pictures of him; Amar is not his real name.
When I first invite him to see The Frontline – Ché Walker’s new play at Shakespeare’s Globe which details Camden’s bristling, thronged night scene – he asks me what time will it end. “I’ve got to be home by nine,” he explains. “I’m on tag.”
His social worker must talk to his lawyer, who must ask the court if his client’s bail conditions (the result of a previous drug charge) can be lifted for an evening. The process will take about a week: I call Amar to confirm a matinee instead. “Yeah, that’s all right,” he says. “But what do I get from this?” It’s a question I can’t directly answer.
I first met Amar outside Highbury Magistrates’ Court in June. He was lighter-skinned than most of the exiled TMS crew, his thin frame wrapped up in a heavy black coat, combat trousers and Nike Air Force Ones. The soft burr of a young moustache lurked about his top lip. One of his eyes was greeny-brown; the other gun metal grey. He asked me if my watch was real, and if I’d like to give it to him. Then he asked me what it was like being a journalist.
Under the terms of his bail, Amar is already banned from the borough so we cannot meet in Camden for our trip to the Globe. We agree on King’s Cross which, although technically still Camden, Amar can visit with impunity because he lives there. If the police catch him north of Euston Road though, it’s immediate arrest and possibly jail. Amar says he’s been remanded in custody five times for breaching these rules.
He arrives 40 minutes late, walking slowly with an exaggerated bowl, and declares he’s not expecting much: “It’s gonna be one of those fake TV things where they get all their information from the police. Police know what happens, but they don’t know why.”
Amar came to England from Ethopia five years ago, when he was 13. He has no family in this country; he left them all behind and travelled here alone.
“I came to this country to be something,” he explains. “Back home there’s money to be made but people don’t think like that – I wanted to come back [to Ethiopia] with a business brain.”
He enrolled at South Camden Community School (SCCS) in Somers Town, but the lure of easy money selling cannabis soon proved too much and at 16 he was expelled for his behaviour. After that he split his time between hanging around “on Frontline” (what he and his friends call Camden Town) and halfhearted attempts at a Business NVQ at Westminster Kingsway College. Eventually, “Frontline” won out.
“I’m not going to lie – when I first came to Camden I thought that was the life for me,” he says. “Everything was there. You can get there early and stay there all day... £40 of weed you can sell for £200. Some of the tourists are so para [paranoid] they don’t even look at what you’re giving them. Some boys don’t even bother selling weed, they just get those mixed herbs and bag them up.
“There’s a lot of us, and only one or two go to school now. It’s hard for young people to get out of that life. [People] see so much money. When you do that kind of stuff there’s no age limit. You can be 15 and earning a lot of money in Camden. By the time they get to 18 they don’t want to get some legit job with no money. And all those people have got younger brothers. They got money to flash around, and the brothers think, ‘I want that money’. You wait for the young ’uns to come up – they’re going to be crazier than we ever were.”
Many of his friends now face a minimum three-year ban from Camden for their part in what police describe as an “aggressive cannabis market” but Amar says they never behaved like dealers.
“Us lot – we just stayed there, drank there, fought there, messed about – we made it hot for ourselves,” he tells me. “Everyone is regretting that now.”
He suggests a 10pm curfew should be imposed on under-18s in Camden to stop them getting into trouble.The play has started when we arrive. Myriad characters stalk about the stage, talking over each other. A young Ethiopian guy comes over to our side of the stage whispering “skunkweed” under his breath. “That’s me!” Amar laughs, pointing at him. When the character returns to the spot later in the play to hawk drugs to the crowd Amar talks back at him, beckoning him over to the stalls with menace: “Skunk, yeah? Come on. Come up here.”
He seems to hate the character, Miruts, who appears unusually happy for a teenage drug dealer, but at the interval he’s the first person he talks about. “You know he’s acting, but his laughing is how it is on Frontline. When you’re on Frontline you’re smoking, you got money, everything is bless.”
When Miruts mentions a drug “connect” called One-Eyed Bruce, Amar flicks his wrist triumphantly.
“I know One-Eyed Bruce!” he exclaims. “That guy is mad.”
He tells me afterwards that One-Eyed Bruce makes a living robbing the drug dealers of Camden. Once he threatened a friend of Amar’s, and the group turned on him with bottles. One-Eyed Bruce returned with a “huge knife” and was arrested shortly afterwards. “I still see him around,” says Amar, “but he’s bless now. We get on all right.”
Amar takes a phonecall just before a stage fight between two rival gangs, but when I tell him about it later he is unimpressed. “They wouldn’t just fight. They’d talk first. You’d want to know what they were doing on your spot, then you’d ask them for the money they’d made, then you’d fight them.” He is similarly unmoved by a rap – “The war on drugs is just a war on blacks” –- performed by some of the “street” characters. “This is dead,” he declares, shaking his head.
All the characters have an innate, choric knowledge of their street companions’ business. It strikes me as a theatrical device but Amar insists it is true to life: “Most of the time the people that sell drugs are cool with the people that work around there. In case anything happens, you know? They want the people right next to them to be on their side. Say if the police want to arrest them and they need witnesses. Bouncers, cornershops – they’re the ones that can get you away, say you weren’t involved in stuff.”
FRONTLINE'S writer, Ché Walker, was born and raised in Somers Town. It is his second play about Camden, a culmination of his experiences as a youth worker in Highgate Newtown, Kilburn, and Feltham Young Offenders. Some of the play’s gang members were cast from WAC in Belsize Park, another youth project he is involved in. One night while waiting for a bus he witnessed Camden in all its violent, Hogarthian “insanity” and knew he had to write about it. He and the cast were on a research trip in Camden Town the night Sharma’arke Hassan, a friend of Amar’s, was shot and killed. At the end of the play, the Ethiopian dealer Miruts dies, the victim of a drug deal gone sour. His last words are spoken in Amharic: “Bury me in my country.” Amar, who has slouched for most of the performance, sits upright. “He’s talking my language,” he says.
On the way home he tells me he doesn’t want to deal. “I’m trying to move on,” he says. “When you do things like that you don’t move up. You just do it until you get caught by police and they bring you down to the start again and you got nothing.”
“If I could just get £30,000 or something, if I could get that money, I’d get out straight away. I’d go back home to Ethiopia and buy some land. Maybe I’d build some houses on it, or a farm.”
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