THE woman said nothing. She just appeared by the table in the St Helier pub where Nick Whitcombe was sitting with two associates, and seemed reluctant to take his order.
He looked down at the menu, and looked up at her. She looked at him. Nothing happened.
Then everything happened: A dozen police officers swarmed into the bar, surrounded the table and the trio were placed in handcuffs and marched into the patrol cars lining the street outside. Within seconds, the officers, including the plain-clothes female police officer who first interrupted their lunch, left the scene and the bar returned to normal. And Mr Whitcombe was left wondering what the police had managed to uncover about his secret life of the past 12 months.
Looking back now, the 30-year-old recognises that that day seven years ago was a pivotal moment – the point where one life ended and another began.
‘I needed to be caught, I needed to go to prison. If I hadn’t I would have inevitably ended up dead or with a sentence so long that I couldn’t possibly have recovered from it. I regret losing myself the way I did, but to this day I do not regret getting caught,’ he says.
In some ways Mr Whitcombe’s life journey from the Wirral on Merseyside to HMP La Moye followed a familiar narrative, a story told by defence advocates with depressing regularity whenever the Royal Court convenes to sentence a drug trafficker.
He was the boy who was abandoned by his parents as a child and who fell into the wrong crowd – a crowd who saw huge profits in shipping drugs to Jersey.
But his life was far from ordinary: he was, in fact, the boy who was abandoned by his parents as a child, who was travelling the world business-class a few years later after carving out a career in the free-running parkour movement, who turned to bodybuilding a few years later, became consumed by a craving for power, saw pound signs in a drug-trafficking operation to Jersey and ended up getting caught and playing Scrabble with an axe murderer in La Moye.
The Nick Whitcombe of 2021 is unrecognisable from the Nick Whitcombe of 2014, both in attitude and appearance. The skinhead bad boy is gone. Now bespectacled and with a mop of hair and wearing a smart jumper during the online Zoom interview with the JEP, he looks more like an accountant than cross-Channel drug smuggler.
He has transformed his life and is now a respectable gym owner and community champion who has successfully fought to change government legislation on lockdown rules and has picked up plaudits and awards on the way.
Never before has a Jersey drug trafficker been so candid about their descent into criminality, but Mr Whitcombe feels it is an important story to tell.
‘I had a really rough upbringing. My mum got pregnant with me at 15 and she had me at 16 and my dad was out of the picture by the time I was about two,’ he says.
‘We left my grandmother’s house when I was five or six and we went to live in a poor area. To be honest, she was a poor mother. She was only interested in sleeping and smoking and doing her own things so at seven or eight years old I would be out until ten o’clock or eleven o’clock at night mixing with people double my age.
‘It got to the point when I was 12 years old that I had this unwritten agreement with my mum that she was just going to leave me to do whatever I wanted to do, and she would therefore be devoid of any responsibility of a mother. I was 12 years old and she stopped providing for me, she stopped cleaning for me, cooking for me, not that she really did that much anyway.’
Mr Whitcombe found solace in a friend whose life was equally as bleak. Together the pair got through the days by stealing food from the back of supermarkets and hanging around on the streets and semi-derelict playgrounds of the Wirrel. Occasionally they would even attend school.
‘School knew they couldn’t control me at the time. I just wasn’t fitting into the school system. Don’t get me wrong, I stayed in the top sets in nearly everything. I never struggled with learning – I just didn’t like the structure and the way it was delivered,’ he says.
But school did notice an avenue for Mr Whitcombe to channel some positive energy. By now he was displaying a keen interest in parkour – the free-running movement where participants jump over and negotiate obstacles, often in an urban environment.
‘Me and the school came to an agreement where I was allowed three or four days a week off school to do stuntwork with friends.’
A short time later, everything began to change.
Newspapers started to take notice of his parkour skills. The movement was still in its infancy but was being propelled into the mainstream by the growing popularity of video streaming websites, particularly YouTube.
‘There was no one else doing what we were doing so when brands started to pick up on it, it was a very small pond to fish from. We were the best, at the time at least.’
And so he founded Apex Parkour with a group of friends. At 14, the group was attracting the attention of major brands, and would soon find themselves thrust into the forefront of a rapidly growing, and increasingly lucrative, industry.
Drinks brands, including Monster and Redbull, wanted them. Then sports brands came calling.
‘I was learning on my feet. I was maybe 15 or 16 and I am on the phone to marketing directors at Adidas just trying to guess my way through a phone call.
‘And they are asking me to send an invoice over, and I’m thinking they mean a receipt, so I am trying to push them to send me the money first and they are trying to explain what they mean. I look back on it now and think “oh my god”.
‘I was flying all over the world – we were charging £600 to £1,600 per day plus expenses. We were 16 and flying business-class for Adidas at this point.’
Life began to change in 2010. Mr Whitcombe’s knees had been wrecked by years of parkour. He stayed on at Apex in a managerial role, but his free-running days had come to an end.
‘I joined a gym and this is when it started to go downhill. Until this point my life has been nothing but community, good people and lots of charity work with my parkour.
‘Everything that is good in the world, that is what we were as a group.
‘When I joined the gym I took an interest in bodybuilding after another gym member suggested I had the genetic potential to do well. Skip forward 18 months, I competed in my first bodybuilding show and won the title of Junior Mr Britain.’
He was featured in magazines and websites, but the attention and fame came at a price. Mr Whitcombe’s sense of community and desire to help others was being replaced by what he acknowledges was a ‘deluded sense of self-importance and a feeling of invincibility’.
By mid-2013 this one-time teetotal, anti-drugs fitness fanatic was a steroid using bodybuilder working the doors of nightclubs in Liverpool’s Slater Street.
‘Looking at me from the outside – a 6ft, 19 stone skinhead – I fitted the stereotype of a doorman perfectly and I was just as much of an a**hole as the stereotypical doorman.
‘I started to lust for it – I enjoyed the violence, I enjoyed the control, I enjoyed the power. I look back and it was disgusting and it makes me cringe.
‘Anyway, I start falling into darker circles. My circle of friends changed completely, I went from being this community driven guy who goes out on litter picks on Saturday and Sunday with gangs of kids to now being in the VIP section of clubs buying bottles of champagne for everyone. I was surrounded by new people who I thought were friends at the time.
‘And so people started to see me as a business opportunity and started asking me to move stuff around for them.’
It began as it often does for those who end up in the dock for dealing – initially buying and using a small amount of drugs, in Mr Whitcombe’s case, only ever steroids.
And then selling drugs to fund the habit. But before long Mr Whitcombe was selling steroids and recreational drugs to not only fund his habit, but the lifestyle of champagne and flash cars he had assumed.
He is reluctant to say how much he was making, although admits it was probably more than £10,000 per week.
But his shift into proper, commercial drug dealing – the supply of drugs within Liverpool and eventually the shipment of drugs by post to Jersey – was never really about the money. The money was just an enabler for a lifestyle he craved – it was about the power, not the cash.
‘The potential for financial gain – especially for Jersey – is huge but that was never the driver for me. In a sense it was because the more money you have the more power you have, so it was a driver in a secondary effect.
‘But I never wanted to buy things and shroud myself in wealth. Money was only important to me because it gave me control over people. Every day I would get three of my friends and we would go to a restaurant for breakfast and I would pay. We’d go out for lunch and I would pay. We’d go for dinner and I would pay and we would go out clubbing and I would buy the bar out to pay for everyone. I wanted to be in control.’
Mr Whitcombe was never a drugs kingpin, one of the mysterious characters who hang back in the shadows, orchestrating the operation while staying far enough removed to avoid a spell behind bars should the whole thing come crashing down.
But when a rival dealer set himself up in Liverpool, he knew the individual needed attending to.
It was an encounter that would ultimately take him to La Moye.
‘So there was this gent who was dealing in one of the clubs in Liverpool city centre and that was our area. He was being quite vocal about what he was planning to do – so I set up a bogus deal.
‘I said to a mate, who looked like a nice ordinary student kid, to go to Tesco and buy a throwaway mobile phone and say he wanted to buy a sample of drugs.
‘So he arranges the deal, say £50 of drugs.
‘I said give it a few more days and text him back and say it was great and that you want a few hundred pounds more. ‘So we set this deal up and we get an Albanian from Newcastle and he drives to Liverpool with my guy and they meet this gent and he jumps into the back of the car thinking he is making the deal of the century.
‘And then they take him down a side street, take the drugs off him, take his phone off him, take his shoes off him and kick him out the car and tell him that this is what happens if you intrude on territory.
‘A few days later I got in contact with him and explained why it had happened. I said you either work for us or you don’t work at all.
‘Me and him got talking and he said he had contacts in Jersey and he told us about the market and how much money there is over there and that’s how it began.’
The operation was simple: they would give themselves a window of about three or four weeks to take a chunk out of Jersey’s lucrative drugs scene. The new recruit flew to the Island and based himself in Jersey. Mr Whitcombe stayed in Merseyside facilitating the shipment of the drugs – often the former legal high mephedrone which by the point had been made a class B substance – through the postal system.
But they quickly ran into a problem. A new dealer in a city can remain unnoticed and largely irrelevant for weeks, if not months. A new dealer in an island nine by five cannot.
‘So he has flown over and tried to make himself the big man on the Island, you know, saying “I’ve come from Liverpool and I work for this man”.
‘You know what Jersey is like, it’s like wildfire – not only have you got the wildfire from the good people who want to turn you in but you have got wildfire from the other dealers who want to turn you in for competitive reasons. So it was destined to fail from day one.’
It was a risk that Mr Whitcombe and his associate were willing to take. The profit-making potential in Jersey is a constant lure for UK drugs gangs, who can increase their income ten-fold if only they can get their substances across the water.
‘I knew that islands generally yield higher profits because I had spent time in the Isle of Man, but the Isle of Man is not the extreme that Jersey is in terms of profits and that is specifically due to the Jersey police.
‘The police force in Jersey is second to none.
‘I don’t understand why people who deal drugs hate the police. The police give the drugs the value, and that may sound strange. But if you take the police out of the equation then the drugs just become a free trading commodity and anyone can do it.’
In the early days of the operation, the associate never knew he was under surveillance by the States police.
And in June 2014, a few weeks after it all began, the force got a break when Mr Whitcombe and a friend, who had no connection to the drugs enterprise, flew to Jersey for a few days of fun.
‘I had no reason to be there because he was going to send the money back. I’d just had an argument with my girlfriend and I thought, “let’s go to Jersey and I can pick some money up while I am there and we can play on some jet skis and we’ll just have a good time”.
‘As it turns out he must have told people we were coming because the Jersey police had us under observation from the moment we stepped off the plane. There are pictures of me and my friend stepping off the plane from Liverpool. We must have looked the part – I was about 18 stone I think and my friend was 22 stone, he is a huge guy, about 6ft 3.’
Later in the day the trio found went to a town centre pub for a bite to eat. And a woman appeared by their table.
‘She stands next to me and I thought she was going to take my order and I looked at this lady and looked at the menu and I was waiting for her to say “what do you want” and then all of a sudden there are police everywhere, police cars everywhere and we were arrested there and then.’
